What happens when a lady scientist discovers a “key” to the manipulation of genetic patterns that keep different species from intermingling?

The lady becomes a tiger—of the man-eating variety. She is wild, beautiful, and deadly. And she soon decides that she must share her sinister secret with other women. The lovely killer genes multiply geometrically…and so does the fatality rate. The country becomes littered with chewed-up bodies. All men.

Enter Remo and Chiun—The Destroyer—the only weapon against this carnivorous cutie. Handsome Remo, fast on the chase becomes her prisoner—and love slave. Conspiracy and criminality fall into Remo’s usual area of operation. Genetic warfare and animalistic passions are something else again. Especially when the enemy looks like a Playboycenterfold!

So, as Remo is about to choose between going down in flames or up in smoke, Chiun sees a way to preserve the integrity of man’s chromosomes, and stay alive…something to do with the ancient Korean proverb about knowing which tale of the tiger to take!

It took me long enough, but I’ve branched out my Man Fantasy reading into The Destroyer. It’s been on my list for a while, seeing as how Penetrator book covers make such a big point of being “As modern as The Destroyer!” It turns out that modern is an odd word to choose in that case. It’s not just that the book takes place in forty years ago. That can’t be helped. Nevertheless, nothing about the book struck me as more “modern” than any other book from that same time period. It was just a book where things happened in 1978. Of course, the same holds true for The Penetrator, so I guess it’s not a lie.

So far I’ve read books from three other Man Fantasy series: The Penetrator, The Enforcer, and The Executioner. Of these three, The Destroyer reminds me most of The Enforcer, but with some definite Penetrator similarities. It’s least similar to The Executioner, which is the daddy of ’em all, so that’s interesting in its own right.

It all boils down to how believable everything is. Perhaps that’s not the right way of putting it. Nothing about any of these books is remotely believable. It’s better expressed in terms similar to the way we describe science fiction. The Executioner is a very “hard” action book. It’s got guns and explosions and drama and stuff, but it’s all set in a realistic copy of our world. The Penetrator is similar, but it adds in some faux-Native American mysticism that, within the context of the stories, is real. There are also some super-science plots, but they’re still fairly grounded. At least, they are relative to The Enforcer, who is a literal psychic clone, and our newest exploration. Remo Williams, The Destroyer, isn’t a psychic clone, but he is that variety of martial arts master that puts one in mind of someone like the Iron Fist. It’s martial arts so keen, so powerful, so masterful, that Remo is a superhuman. It’s also possible that he’s an incarnation of Shiva, hence why he’s called The Destroyer. This is very odd, because I always assumed Shiva is an Indian deity. Nothing else in this book is even remotely Hindu.

And then there’s his master and partner, Chiun. Chiun is probably more powerful than Remo is. Both characters can move so quickly that it’s invisible, for instance. In one case, near the very beginning of the book, Remo shoves a shotgun up a guy’s ass so quickly that the guy doesn’t even know it happened until he wakes up in a hospital later. That’s the kind of thing we’re dealing with.

And then there’s the plot of the book. It’s so far out there! I love it! It’s insane!

The book opens with some people protesting a university science lab. I love this. The crowd is protesting what they believe is the lab’s ability to create “genetic monsters.” What is abundantly clear is that the crowd has no idea what it’s talking about. Some people get up and make some grandstanding speeches, and they’re all complete nonsense. The kind of stuff you’d expect that particular aunt to share on Facebook. You know the one.

To rebut the crowd, a scientist comes out to address them. This is the “lady scientist” that the back of the book so patronizingly refers to. She’s Dr. Sheila Feinberg, and despite what the blurb says, she’s not an incredibly attractive woman. In fact, she’s described as rather plain. Still, she’s whip smart, and after a few minutes of berating the crowd for being so stupid, she decides to make a grand demonstration of her own.

She has with her a phial of “chromosomes.” No, I have no idea what that’s even supposed to mean. Free-floating DNA strands? Cell nuclei? Just…cells? Who knows? Who cares?

Anyway, she says that, to prove her point, she’s going to just drink it. She does.

Then she passes out.

Later she wakes up and she’s part tiger.

I shit you not. This is the plot of this novel. This woman is now part tiger. Quite literally. She’s got the strength, speed, and agility of a tiger. Also claws. And also also she’s got an unquenchable hunger for human flesh.

The book took a very dark turn at the beginning in a way that made me think that the whole thing was going to be a lot more disturbing than it was. See, one of the protesters at this event was a particularly annoying woman and her particularly annoying baby child. I found them both quite distasteful, representing a lot of things about both science ignorance and lack of child-rearing skills that just hit a little close to home for me. Anyway, it’s not even a quarter of the way through the book that this annoying woman finds her annoying baby with its stomach ripped out and eaten. While the rest of the book had its dark moments, this was very much the darkest and actually seems out of place in retrospect.

Enter Remo. We first find Remo and Chiun at some kind of a bar. We learn a lot about their relationship, which is very…interesting. It’s got some standard tropes that it’s leaning into very hard. Chiun is Remo’s teacher, and he spends a lot of time berating Remo for his incompetence. He is a master of Sinanju, a variety of martial art that is native to Korea. I have just now learned that there is a region in North Korea that shares that name. It was heavily bombed during the Korean War.

Chiun often complains about leaving the legacy of Sinanju to a stupid white man who doesn’t deserve it. That sort of thing. He’s a disturbingly-portrayed character. He’s a racist caricature, but he’s also very racist himself. Several times he comments on how he’s trying to be more tolerant, and then he says something about how he looks forward to the day when white people and black people can put aside their differences and unite in their inferiority to yellow people. Stuff like that. It’s…wow. Not good.

He’s very much a stereotype, and it makes a lot of the book hard to read. He also does most of the real work in the story. Remo, for instance, spends a lot of it out of commission after his first encounter with the feral Dr. Feinberg. Chiun has to heal him up, set up defenses, and then figure out a way to re-teach Remo his abilities. More on that in a minute.

There’s a bar fight and Remo kicks a bunch of redneck ass, I guess for the sole purpose of showing us how awesome he is. He only does it because Chiun is being a pain in the ass himself. He’s sitting in the truck demanding complete silence so that he can write a book. This means that Remo has to keep another guy from starting his own truck. Not unreasonably, the other guy takes offense to that. He’s the one who ends up with a shotgun up his ass.

Dr. Feinberg is meanwhile using the fact that genetic manipulation is super easy to her advantage. Who needs CRISPR when you can just grab some chromosomes and eat them? At one point she takes the skin from a baby’s eyes and uses it to tighten her own wrinkles away. She uses the promise of this ability to lure other women into her organization, to whom she gives the tiger formula and starts to raise a small army. She also gives herself giant breasts, blond hair, and presumably other advantages so that she can accomplish whatever it is she wants to accomplish. You know, chromosomes.

Mainly, her goal is to destroy humanity. Or at least subjugate it. She perceives herself as the first of a new species, one that is superior to H. Sapiens. You know that drill.

Remo and Chiun, while being masters of Sinanju, are also the sole agents of a federal agency called CURE. The only people who even know about CURE are themselves, their handler, Harold Smith, and the president, who is unnamed but has a Southern accent. Smith puts our heroes on the hunt for Dr. Feinberg, who is around the Boston area.

Murders are happening. Gruesome ones. We get to see a few of them. They’re largely of men who Dr. Feinberg seduces, but not always. The back of the book got that wrong. Sometimes she kills and eats women, other times children.

It doesn’t take long before Remo runs into her, but she’s got the advantage. He’s looking for the frumpy dark-haired woman from the beginning of the book. He lets his defenses down when he runs into a bosomy blond woman who turns out to have claws and teeth. He fends her off, but takes some hits. He’s out for a while.

Even after Chiun gets him healed up, there’s this whole weird bit about how his body has regressed so that he’s lost his Sinanju powers. It doesn’t have anything to do with the plot itself. Dr. Feinberg is as oblivious to it as anybody. It just happens so that, I guess, the stakes are raised a bit. Plus it keeps Remo from preparing himself and avoiding most of the rest of the book. A big deal is made about how Remo starts smoking again. Apparently that was a nasty habit he had before he became a Sinanju master, but Chiun broke him of the habit. Now that his training has left, his old bad habits have come flooding back.

Dr. Feinberg’s little army is on the grow, but she’s not satisfied with where it’s going. “It” in this case being both her plan and her new species. She needs new blood, and the blood she wants belongs to Remo Williams. By blood, I mean semen.

She’s convinced that he’s the most viable male the human race has ever produced. She doesn’t know that most of his strength comes from his training. Without that, it turns out that Remo Williams is a fairly normal guy who likes to smoke and lie around and eat greasy food. Still, after a bit of back-and-forth, she manages to capture him and take him back to a remote cabin in the woods, whereupon she makes him have sex with her repeatedly. At first he likes it, but he’s later troubled by the idea of what she’ll do when she’s done with him. Dr. Feinberg is troubled by Remo’s passivity. Isn’t he supposed to be the ultimate man?

In the end it turns out that all Remo needs to do to get his powers back is to breathe right, so he does that and escapes. There’s a big showdown. Dr. Feinberg is convinced that she’s finally gotten pregnant, so she’s free to kill Remo. She thinks this because she keeps vomiting. Part of me thinks it takes a little longer than a few days for morning sickness to kick in? I honestly don’t know. Several sources are telling me that it’s about six weeks into the pregnancy, but that’s for humans, not tiger-women.

The two face off in a field somewhere. Remo sets it on fire, which helps because all animals hate fire and she’s more animal than person even though she’s also a noted genetic scientist. It distracts her enough that he’s able to fight her off a bit, and then he throws her just so that she lands on a stick or something and gets impaled. She’s dead.

When Chiun shows up, Remo explains that she wasn’t pregnant at all. Her body was beginning to reject the tiger chromosomes so that she would become a regular human again. That was what was making her vomit, and it was what let Remo have enough of an edge to finally take her down.

The book ends with Chiun making a joke about using DNA to turn all races into Asians, and then turn them all into Koreans, and then turn them all into North Koreans so that everybody can enjoy the same superiority that he does. I guess that if this were a TV show it would freeze-frame on everybody laughing and then the credits would roll.

And there you have it. This was a crazy-ass book. I would have had a good time reading it if it hadn’t been so damned keen on the harmful Asian stereotypes. All that ninja-master-with-the-long-mustache stuff is so gross. I’m not sure if it’s better or worse than Yellow Peril Asian stereotypes. I don’t think I’m qualified to make that call.

Remo, on the other hand, is a fun character. He’s got some charm and personality. More than any of the other Man Fantasy heroes I’ve read. He can actually banter instead of lecture. His morality is more along the lines of “whatever I’m told to do,” which might be problematic, but it wasn’t in this book. Still, he’s a regular guy who got trained to have superpowers, which is refreshing. He’s not yet another guy with a dark past and a long list of names to take out.

The book had a tendency to digress for several pages at a time. The narration would hook onto a character besides any of the main ones. Usually this character was one about to be killed by Dr. Feinberg. We’d get all sorts of unnecessary information about, say, the Italian/Irish tensions in Boston or a particular police officer’s career history and the time his dad died. This was very similar to the way Penetrator books would give a lot of backstory just before Mark Hardin explodes their heads, but it was different enough in execution. I guess you could say that pre-death backstories in The Penetrator tend to be more personal than in The Enforcer, who will go off on tangent after tangent. My assumption is that both of these are efforts to hit an agreed-upon word count.

And that’s this incredibly bananas book. I honestly had a good time with it, but only in that sense of “oh no what’ll happen next.” From a scientific point of view, nothing made the least bit of sense. It’s so absurd that it probably needs to be read as some kind of a fantastical allegory. I bet if you read it right, this book would have a lot more in common with The Alchemist than anything, which is a nice segue into the fact that I have another one of these books waiting for me and it has an actual alchemist in it. I’m excited!

The brass called it a by-the-book mission. Lt. Nicole Shea was too green to know that, in space, there’s no such thing…

Since the last review was a book by a comics industry legend, I figured I might as well make a thing out of it and do a book by a different comics industry legend. I had forgotten that I had this one, so it was a lucky break that I found it before picking a different book.

Claremont’s claim to fame is that he wrote for Marvel Comics, specifically on Uncanny X-Men from 1975 to 1991. He’s co-responsible for a large number of characters that have since become staples, folks like Rogue, Gambit, and Shadowcat. His full list is a long one, and when I read it I find myself reflexively trying to put it to the tune of the Pokérap.

He also coined Wolverine’s catchphrase (“I’m the best at what I do…”) and, with John Byrne, wrote the pivotal “Dark Phoenix” and “Days of Future Past” storylines. He also worked for Image, Dark Horse, and DC on some things I’m not super familiar with.

Apart from being kind of a big deal, Claremont is also an incredibly good guy.

So here I am with FirstFlight, his first novel. I didn’t expect it to be very good. The cover just reeks of 80s badassery, which is fine because what else would you expect from Luis Royo? The back is better than the front and probably should have served as the front cover since it reflects the plot a lot better. There were no futuristic fighter planes in this book.

On the back, though, we’ve got plot elements! There’s a spaceship, there’s a rock shooting at it, and there’s a martial arts exhibition between our heroine and a guy who looks a lot like an adult film actor from the time period.

There’s also the fact that I’ve read two other famous comics writers on this blog and neither of them have impressed me from that angle. Gerry Conway is responsible for Balzan and whatever this was, while we visited Gardner Fox again just last week. I had started to wonder if maybe the ability to write comics and the ability to write novels might be two skills that don’t translate well to one another.

Of course, I know that’s not the case, at least not today. Saladin Ahmed (Black Bolt w/ C. Ward, Exiles w/ Javier Rodriguez), Nnedi Okorafor (X-Men: Wakanda Forever w/ Ray-​Anthony Height), and Ta-Nehisi Coates (Black Panther w/ Brian Stelfreeze) have been rocking it in the comics lately, despite starting their careers as print writers. Ryan North started in webcomics and went on to write Squirrel Girl with Erica Henderson (the best comic ever), yet also managed to give us the incredible chooseable-path adventures To Be or Not to Be and Romeo and/or Juliet.

There are, no doubt, a ton more examples.

And here we have Claremont and his first novel. How was it? I hear you champing at the bit for this one.

To sum it all up quickly, it was fine. It had a lot going for it and only a few things going against it. It didn’t grab me, but it didn’t let me down. It was better than mediocre. It was competent. Let’s break it down.

Claremont is often lauded for his strong female characters. This book is no exception. Nicole Shea is a lieutenant in the USAF, but she’s currently working for NASA. She’s an astronaut. She’s also a badass.

The book opens with one of those things I don’t like. It’s not an unforgivable sin, but it’s one of those tropes that are a bit overdone. Maybe it was less overdone in 1987. I would not mind being corrected. Anyway, here’s the trope in fake example form:

“OH MY GOD WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE” screamed Steve, the freedok.

Steve was right. The ship exploded. All hands were lost.

He looked up to see the blinking SIMULATION OVER on the main screen. He was not happy.

There are plenty of reasons why that kind of cold open works. It shows how our hero acts under pressure and what we might expect of them in the future. It gives the hero a starting point from which to grow and develop in terms of skill and character. It gets the reader excited right as the book kicks off.

It’s also just…a bit cliché, and that initial excitement turns to “Oh…right. That didn’t count.”

Anyway, Nicole opens up the book by failing her training mission spectacularly. It boils down to the fact that she took off her helmet just before the disaster struck. She was bored and had a screw the rules mentality. It didn’t pay off.

This elementary failure causes Nicole to be scrubbed from the astronaut training program…until a very high-ranking officer and hero takes a shine to her and overrules that decision.

So yeah, the setup to this book is based on some standard tropes, and I was, by this point, preparing myself to be bored with the book for the rest of its 250 pages or so. But then Claremont threw some fantastic worldbuilding at me and I was impressed.

The book takes place at an unspecified date, but it’s one that’s very near the present. One bit of narration mentions that it’s only been three generations since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and at another point we have a character mention Bob Dylan and how he “lived to see it.” Next Sunday, A.D., in other words.

But here’s the thing: Humans have discovered FTL. It was an overnight thing, a chance discovery, and it changed everything. We don’t get many details on how it works, which is fine, but we do know that the inner workings are “deceptively simple” or something like that. We’re now exploring neighboring star systems.

And here’s another thing: The Baumier Drive, as it’s called, is not a precision instrument. It’s only good for very long distances. As a result, moving around intrasystem is still a slog. That can be remedied a bit by charting the system in detail, and that’s what Nicole’s first real mission is. A milk run to Pluto and back, laying down some beacons. Nicole is given command of the Wanderer for just that purpose.

She has a diverse and well-developed crew. They interact well, and all have fleshed-out backstories and personalities that work. Her buddy Paolo, whom we met in the beginning disaster, is there, along with a Russian dude, a Japanese lady, an Israeli fella, and a Marshal named Ben Ciari, whose badassery and philosophy teaches us a lot about the world of the book.

Ciari’s job is basically space cop, and he takes it seriously. He has no romantic notions about space travel, and he doesn’t hesitate to disabuse Nicole of her own beliefs in them. He trains the crew in self-defense techniques, but he’s quickly established as not being some dumb space brute. He’s also a philosopher, a lawyer, and a medic. Space travel, he explains, requires a person to wear many hats. It’s an extremely competitive environment. On the plus side, though, any amount of excitement is alongside some long stretches of boredom. The good spacers use that time to learn new skills. An eighteen-month flight out to Pluto, for instance, is a good time to earn another degree in something.

Nicole and Ciari end up banging a few times, and most of the interpersonal drama comes from the two of them. Ciari scares Nicole a little bit, but she’s also intensely attracted to him. He’s attracted to her in response, but his no-nonsense realism causes him to make it clear that this is only a temporary thing. The realities of spaceflight will see to that. After the mission, they will go their separate ways. Not by choice, but because that’s how the system works.

It turns out that this mission is goes anything but smoothly. After a while (about midway through the book), our crew finds itself in the asteroid belt. They intercept a distress call and move to investigate, although it throws their entire flight plan out the window. The spaceflight mechanics in this book are fairly hard science. Our heroes have to worry about the conservation of ΔV, for instance.

Investigating this distress call leads to our first real hazards of the book, and those hazards lead to even bigger hazards. It turns out that there are pirates flying around the belt, and their equipment and methods are surprisingly advanced. When another American ship shows up, presumably to help, it turns out to have been captured by pirates. The pirates also have a base made out of a hollowed-out asteroid and guns. A lot of things go very wrong, very quickly. Nicole’s ship is disabled, and three of her crew sacrifice themselves to save everybody else. One of the dead is her friend Paolo. Nicole is devastated. Her first command has resulted in the death of a dear friend, along with two other crew members, and there’s a solid chance that she and the rest of the crew will be lost too.

The book takes an interesting turn when Hana, the Japanese civilian crew member whose name looks a lot too much like “Haha” in the font this publisher chose, discovers that there’s a ship inbound. The Wanderer is disabled, so at first everyone assumes this is a rescue from Earth. Observations reveal, however, that this isn’t an Earth ship at all.

The crew of the Wanderer is able to scrap together enough thrust to intercept the ship and board it, whereupon they discover that the ship isn’t empty. It’s inhabited by some cat-looking aliens who at first seem upset that people have boarded their ship, but aren’t hostile.

The communications problem is alleviated when the aliens choose a crew member to genetically modify. They choose Ben Ciari, Nicole’s occasional lover, and mutate him into something a bit more like themselves. He serves as a bridge between the two races, and everything starts to look friendly and good. The procedure is reversable, he explains, and he tells us a lot about the aliens.

The space pirates show up again. We learn that the leader of the space pirates is a General Daniel Morgan, formerly of the US military. A decorated war hero, Morgan was ousted unceremoniously after saving a bunch of lives. He won the Congressional Medal of Honor, but all the effort and stress involved left him medically unfit for duty. Now he’s working to kill the people who kicked him out of the military, which is a pretty good clue as to why he got discharged in the first place.

Nicole and crew work together with the cat people, called the Halyan’t’a, to defeat the pirates, and it all works out in the end, although it’s sufficiently dramariffic to have kept me reading closely. Really, I enjoyed it, but there’s not much to summarize.

Nicole and the remainder of her crew return to civilization and are all proclaimed heroes. Ciari gets his cat-person-genes fixed and becomes an ambassador to the Halyan’t’a on board a ship called, get this, the Enterprise.

Seriously? You’re gonna name a starship the Enterprise? It’d be one thing if he’d had a character mention that it was named after a prominent fictional ship, but no, nobody even blinks.

Nicole has at least two more adventures after this one, and I look forward to finding them.

Apart from the great worldbuilding, I have to give Claremont a lot of credit for making some character choices that were ahead of their time. The crew of the ship is multinational and ethnically diverse, and they’re also sexually diverse in ways that surprised me. It’s nothing super progressive to our modern sensibilities—the Russian guy is a gay man and Hana, the Japanese woman, is a bisexual—but what impressed me was how matter-of-fact all the other characters were about it. There was no “What?!?! You’re a lesbian!?!” moment. The closest we get was a woman character joking about what a shame it is that the Russian guy is gay, since he is also incredibly handsome.

One near misstep is when we’re introduced to the gay fella and Nicole’s thoughts turn to the AIDS epidemic in a way that comes a little too close to calling it the gay disease. I’m gonna pin this down to the fact that the book is from 1987, not from any kind of prejudice on the part of the author. The fact that AIDS was mentioned at all in a book from ’87 is impressive enough, and seeing as how Claremont has done work for AIDS charities since then, I figure that this is a mistake he corrected. And that’s assuming I just didn’t read too much into it.

Probably the silliest aspect of this book was its insistence on using CamelCase. It’s even in the title, for heaven’s sake, although I’ve seen it printed elsewhere as two words.

Is there a term for the header on a page in a book that tells us the title of the book you’re reading? Whatever it is, this book is clearly named FirstFlight.

The book also gives us StarShips, DropShafts, OutSystem assignments, and many more. It’s very futuristic.

Nicole is a good strong-but-flawed woman character, although the book sometimes tilted a little hard on toward the “flawed” side. It’s a hard needle to thread, and Nicole had this tendency to just zone out during dialogue that grated on me a little bit. Her constant second-guessing herself made more sense, seeing as how this was her first mission and it’s gone terribly wrong.

It was refreshing how comfortable with her sexuality Nicole was, while not being some mega-hot space vixen. While there are beautiful people in this book, Nicole isn’t one of them. She describes herself in one scene as something like “too many bones in not enough skin.” She’s very fit; she’s neither busty nor “earthy” or anything like that. “Boyish” is the best way I can think to describe it, but there’s probably a better word.

Still, she’s got a sexual appetite and she knows how to use it.

Perhaps most interesting in that sense is that she has a fairly explicit sex scene with Ciari on page 127. It doesn’t mention any body parts, but there’s a lot of use of the word thrusting. Anyway, what’s notable is that this single page of sex was so full of typos. The rest of the book had a few, but not really enough to mention. The typo density on this one page increased by so much, though, that I have to imagine something was up. My guess is that the copy editor got a little embarrassed about it and just refused to read the page.

All-in-all, I’d say this was a competent book that deserves some attention. It was also very clearly a first novel. Sometimes it relied a little to heavily on cliché and the dialogue could get a little scrambled and hard to follow. I don’t say that to condemn the book, I just mean that the follow-up novels, along with Claremont’s other non-graphic works, are probably that much more competent for it. The books strengths were more in the realms of worldbuilding, character moments, and emotional details, and that’s all good. I expect that some of the rough edges will get worked out with more experience, and I look forward to finding out.

A fair exchange can be robbery—sometimes. Count Guido della Faziola wanted my body. I wanted the pictures that were hidden in the stateroom of his luxury yacht, I would give him the flesh fest he wanted. But the Count was not likely to hand over the negatives even in exchange for little old me, I was going to have to steal them. My skin tight evening gown with its low, low-cut bodice was an open invitation. The Count’s hand accepted the invitation. Oh, well, I, was in the service of my country. Vive la patriotism!
“Come into my stateroom, cara mia,” he breathed into my ear.
“Yes, let’s,” I breathed back. “I’m going to love you to death.”
Little did he know….

(Amazon.com summary)

I mentioned last week that I was going to track down one of these books, and I’m so glad I held fast to that promise. Folks, what we’ve got here is some gen-u-ine smut!

I want to make it clear that I’m not mocking this book solely on the grounds that it’s erotica. Yes, it was pretty bad for a lot of reasons, but none of those reasons were “It’s a dirty book.” Erotica, like any genre, needs to be judged on its own merits. Does it do the job it’s supposed to? Does it elicit the emotions it intends to? There are different rules from, say, science fiction, but the rules are there to be judged on their own merits, not to be compared to some other genre.

Polygon.com has a good video essay on how horror, melodrama, and porn are all the same genre. Here’s a link. I’m not sure it’s totally related to this essay, but I wanted to link it because I thought it was good.

So erotica, like any other genre, can be a window into a time period. This book was first published in ’67 or ’68 (I keep getting conflicting results on that). Just like science fiction can help pinpoint the social anxieties and hopes of a time period, erotica can tell us something a little more direct and a little more specific. I’m skirting around the obvious here, so I’ll just come out and say it: Vintage erotica gives us a look at what people thought about sex in a particular time. It’s important to note, though, that no element of a society exists in isolation, so learning about the sexual mores of a time period can also provide a glimpse into the rest of it!

Books are awesome!

So this book. Our hero is Eve Drum. She’s called Agent Oh Oh Sex in all the promo materials, and I think that’s pretty funny, but that’s not her code name in the book. She’s called that as a joke by her fellow workers at the federal agency called L.U.S.T.

L.U.S.T. stands for “The League of Underground Spies and Terrorists.” It’s very odd for me to see a government agency openly using the word terrorists as a part of its name. In case you’re wondering, yes, this is an American agency, and yes, they’re supposed to be the good guys.

You know they’re the good guys because their opposite number from the Other Side is called H.A.T.E., the Humanitarian Alliance for Total Espionage.

These acronyms are so terrible. C’mon, Gardner Fox, you’re better than that.

Also, it’s the bad guys who have the word “humanitarian” in their name?

Original 1968 cover from Tower. Artist unknown.

Did I mention that this is my second Gardner Fox book? Did I also mention who Gardner Fox is, and why this book interested me so much? Fox is a legend in the comics industry. He and his associated artists created so many aspects of DC comics that it’s easy to take them for granted. Stuff like Batman’s utility belt, the DC multiverse, and perhaps most importantly, the Justice League.

But like my friend Eric pointed out when I told him about this book, “creating superhero comics particularly back in the day was pretty bad for bill-payin’.”

All that said, this was a tough book to read. The Kindle version claims it was revised, but whoever revised it did a terrible job. I’m sorry, whoever you are, if you’re reading this, but it’s just awful.

The book is so full of typographical errors. They don’t seem like the typical errors that come from bad OCR work. They were just all over the place. Commas just wherever somebody felt like putting them, missing letters or whole words, and blocks of dialogue that simply do not follow the accepted rules of writing dialogue. That last one is the most consistent one, and it drove me crazy. Not because it was just bad and wrong, but because it was actively confusing. Let me dig up an example:

“Go away,” I said, burying my head in the pillow. “L.U.S.T. sends congratulations, Eve. You’ve done a great job, they want you to continue on the case.” (34)

So you might need to know that Eve Drum is the first person narrator of this book. She’s the one doing the talking at the beginning. But then her superior, David Anderjanian, picks up his part of the dialogue without a paragraph break. That whole second part of dialogue is a different person, but every rule of writing says it should still be Eve talking.

This happens a lot.

This book, being the first, introduces both Eve and us to L.U.S.T. She gets recruited right at the beginning of the book over the course of about a half-dozen pages, and then she gets thrown right into the action. The plot of this novel details L.U.S.T.’s effort to keep a secret weapon out of the hands of H.A.T.E. It’s a laser that can shoot down nuclear missiles. Whichever side gets it first will throw the entire Cold War out of whack.

So Eve is placed on this very important case, and the rest of the book breaks down thusly:

Action

“Action”

Action

“Action”

Action

“Action”

Let’s say this book clocks in at about 60,000 words. It turns out that writing an erotic spy novel consists of writing about 30,000 words of spy novel and then filling in the gaps with sexy scenes. Sometimes the two things overlap a bit—Eve’s first mission is to steal some racy pictures from some Italian guy on his yacht. She goes to the Italian guy’s party, which turns out to be an orgy, and then just sexes him senseless so that she can steal the pictures without much of a hitch.

I never got the feeling that Eve’s official speciality in the organization was supposed to be sex, but that it just sort of turned out that way. She’s skilled in other things. She mentions being able to pick locks from an early age, and her L.U.S.T. training has taught her some martial arts, shooting, and things of that nature. She uses those skills throughout the book almost as much as she uses her large breasts and libido.

Something that’s positive about this book is that Eve is never once shamed for her sexuality. She’s never called a slut. It comes a little close to it once, when she’s boning down with somebody and isn’t able to turn off her secret spy microphone (spycrophone) so everybody back at L.U.S.T. hears it. She’s embarrassed by the situation but everybody else just thought it was funny and cheered her on.

There are some icky bits in the book, though. Sometimes they involve Eve. While that she uses sex to complete her mission is completely fine, it’s not fine that sometimes her use of that sex borders on the edge of consent. Eve is set to bodyguard a fella named Martin Sloane, who invented the laser that H.A.T.E. wants so much. The hitch is that Martin is married, and Eve knows that his wife, Midge, isn’t going to like that he’s hanging around with such a bangin’ hottie. Eve’s solution, then, is to seduce Midge so that she’s convinced Eve is a lesbian. The adultery is icky enough, but there’s just a bit too much “What the hell are you doing” coming from Midge. She’s eventually fine with the whole thing, but it wasn’t great.

Another, much grosser, bit is earlier, when we meet the guy who turns out to be the villain, Balder Cunningham. Eve goes to his house for a different orgy, and everything is going fine and dandy until Balder brings out the main event, a “well-known actress” who is never named. She is humiliated and whipped and forced to have sex with all the other guests of the orgy, which would be fine if that were her thing, but it’s clearly not. It’s also clear that it’s not what she was told she’d have to do when she was hired. She ends the scene emotionally and physically devastated. She’s been “paid for” and Cunningham says that this means she can’t do anything about it. What she goes through is sickening and reason enough to let this book remain unread, but also a reminder to us all how legalized sex work would be so much safer for sex workers, as they would have legal recourse for this kind of thing.

Balder is clearly a sadist, which is fine if he would find consenting partners, but he doesn’t. Late in the book he tortures Eve in a way that is just chock full of sexual malice and it’s the worst thing I’ve read in a good while.

Balder is killed at the end of the book when he tries to shoot Eve after she breaks out of her restraints. They’re in his dungeon and he misses her but the bullet ricochets and hits a rope that is holding up a special torture chair, which falls directly onto him.

Eve sexes up pretty much every man in the book except Balder Cunningham, which, again, is fine and consensual. One thing about this book, though, is that everything is described vaguely. The sex is strictly softcore, so no explicit words for genitalia are used, and often the action, which will go for several pages, is described so indirectly that it’s hard to imagine what is happening. Eve will stop doing…something…and then go grab a stool so she and her partner can do…something else.

The non-sexual parts of the book are no better. Eve herself is hardly described beyond having large breasts and a shapely butt. This description also applies to every other woman in the book. I don’t even know what color Eve’s hair is supposed to be, but I know that she—and every other woman in the book—has large nipples.

Later Belmont-Tower edition, 1973. Artist unknown.

There is a positive highlight of this book that I want to mention, and while I don’t expect to read any of the other twenty-odd books in this series, it’s something that I hope persists. Namely, it’s that Eve is very knowledgeable about the history of sexual expression. She will narratively monologue, at length, about the history of certain forms of sexuality. This is always during one of the sex scenes. For instance, if she’s having a lesbian encounter, she will begin telling us about lesbianism throughout history. We’ll get the requisite Sappho and the other ladies of Lesbos, but she’d go on about how harem women would keep themselves occupied, and numerous other examples. Multicultural sexuality, Eve has, and while I don’t know if anything Gardner relates through her voice is accurate, it was very interesting that he felt the need to include that data.

For example, here’s a section where Eve seduces another woman. It’s also a moment that was less than consensual at first, and involves some light bondage:

In Greece, the rites to Aphrodite and Dionysus included flagellation, to stir up the desires. At the Oscophoria, a feast to honor wine itself, the whipping was done with grapevines. (76)

It goes on a lot longer, running us down the history of sexual whipping through Rome, France, and England down to the modern day.

Take for example when she finally makes it with Martin, whose wife she seduced earlier. (Side note: I was expecting a threesome but it never happened.) Her main reason for taking Martin to bed is that Midge mentioned to her how he’s not a very good lover. He’s a very wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am type. Eve will not let this stand. She grows quite fond of Midge after their single encounter, so she takes it upon herself to educate Martin on how to take it more slowly and ensure that his wife gets enjoyment out of the sex act. It is during this long segment of the book that she references the Kama Sutra, but also a ton of other things that I’m not aware of but seemed legit enough.

There is, however, a weird exchange that happens with Eve first broaches the subject to him:

“I understand you,” he grumbled. “You’re a love rebel, a goddamn anarchist when it comes to men and women.” (107)

I’m not even sure what that’s supposed to mean, but my Kindle tells me that page is 69% of the way through the book, so niiiiice.

The book was homophobic in a standard sixties way. Lesbianism or female bisexuality is a source of erotica, male homosexuality is either a source of comedy or of outrage. No surprise, but not acceptable.

This book had a lot in common with some latter-day Heinlein novels. You know the ones. The ones that make you go “haha Robert A. Hornlein.” It would have these sections where Eve would describe “what women are like” and they’ll be the things you’d expect a female side-character from Time Enough for Love to say, stuff like “women are vain things” or “women don’t care what a man looks like as long as he’s a good man” or any number of a million examples you can pry out of one of those books. That a woman is saying it in the narrative is, I guess, supposed to make it more acceptable, and they usually giggle empty-headedly after they say it, but it doesn’t work. It’s one of the worst things about Heinlein, and this book reminded me a lot of it.

So how do we judge this book? Let’s look at it from the two genres it was combining.

As a spy novel, this book was a little less than middlin’. Not too bad, but nothing spectacular or surprising. A bad organization from a bad country wants to capture a guy who invented something that would be very helpful for the Cold War. An agent has to make sure the guy doesn’t get captured. He does get captured, and there’s a rescue, and everything works out in the end. There are some action scenes with alligators and gunfights. It’s no James Bond, but it’s also no Mind Brothers.

And as erotica? This might not be a fair assessment because I was looking at this with a pretty clinical eye, but on the whole, it wasn’t great. Scenes went on too long without much happening. They were interrupted by long stretches of sex history lessons that were more interesting than any of the fuckin’. And sometimes things would happen that didn’t make much sense and I couldn’t tell what was supposed to be happening. The book was a lot more coy about the sex than I was expecting, and skirted around it too much to be good porno, even if it was supposed to be softcore. Seeing as how roughly half the book was the erotic part, it meant that I was ready to skip it and get to the spy part more often than not.

Nonetheless, I made the sacrifice and read the sexy bits because I try to keep some authenticity in these reviews. It’s a difficult job.

They lay together through the mist of countless centuries, while the Earth, the galaxy, the infinities of the universe shifted and resettled and changed again. When they awoke it was to an existence tranquil yet hideous, where human emotions had no place. Their love-making was viewed with suspicion and disgust. Now they were the outsiders, the throwbacks. Yet, with all their human imperfections, they were the only hope for a dying civilization.

This week’s read comes from the fellow science fiction blogger over at Potpourri of Science Fiction Literature, who contacted me on Twitter to gauge my interest in this…whatever it was. I was, of course, interested, and so here we are. I just want to extend my many thanks and encourage people to head over there and check out the reviews!

So…this book. Hoo boy. There’s a lot to talk about, and it’s hard to figure out where to start. There’s just so much I want to tell you about.

I’ll start with the author because that’s simplest. Simply put, I know next to nothing of Ernst Dreyfuss. According to the ISFDB, this is his only genre work. It might be his only work at all. Google reveals nothing other than Amazon listings for this very book. The most important question—Is he related to Richard Dreyfuss?—will remain unanswered.

The fact that this book was published at all says a lot about Tower Books, but it’s worth looking at the other stuff these folks put out. There’s a handy order guide in the back that shows us some westerns of the standard variety, some true crime-esque stuff about Dillinger, and a whole lot of erotica. At least one of these pieces of erotica appears to be gay, even. The best thing, though, is that Tower Books had the exclusive rights to a James Bond erotic parody called The Lady from L.U.S.T., where Eve Drum, agent Oh Oh Sex, gets into adventures. One of the titles is The Hot Mahatma and I can’t even…I just…

holy shit I just looked them up and they were written by comics legend Gardner Fox under a pseudonym

I think I found my next book review.

Anyway sorry about that but I just fell down a huge rabbit hole. Let’s get back to The Unfrozen.

Our first person narrator and protagonist is Neal McDavid. Here’s a fun thing to try: Next time you’re reading a first-person narrative, see how long it takes for the main character’s name to get dropped so that you know it. This book took three and a half pages. It’s also fun to see how it happens. In this case, we had a flashback to a party where he met his girlfriend and the co-tagonist of this book, Marya. It’s not a bad way to do it, but I’m a fan of the “Call me Ishmael” school where the protagonarrator has a voice and just tells us who he is and why we should give a crap.

We learn quickly who Neal and Marya are. They work at a hospital. Neal is an intern, Marya a nurse. They both perform heart surgeries. They are both interested in the future. They believe in life-extension therapies, particularly cryogenics. They look forward to a day when people can be immortal.

They’re also freakin’ stupid people. This is the main crux of the whole book. They make bad decisions constantly. They ignore basic sense, their own medical training, and what people tell them. The book couldn’t happen without this overriding stupidity on the part of the protagonists.

The whole thing kicks off because they keep having unprotected sex with one another before they were married. Marya doesn’t believe in birth control because she’s a Catholic, which is her prerogative, but dammit, if you don’t believe in using birth control and you don’t want to have a baby, don’t fuck. These people are medical professionals so they don’t even have the excuse of it being the late sixties or abstinence-only sex ed. This is as much Neal’s fault as hers. They share complicity in this bad decision.

Marya tells Neal that she’s pregnant, and he responds by asking if she’d consider an abortion, which is a stupid move because she’s already established that she’s against goddamn rubbers and the pill so what the hell dude? She tell him this obvious fact (this book is very fond of stating and repeating obvious facts) at which point he goes “Well, I guess we should get married, except I don’t think I’m ready for that” and she bursts into tears and runs away.

A few paragraphs later there’s an emergency (this whole conversation happened at work) and Neal has to spring to action. He’s training to be a heart transplant doctor, and he’s summoned, which means there’s some new body parts to harvest. This book makes organ donation sound like a free-for-all and we’re not even in the future yet.

Anyway, the body turns out to be Marya, who got into a car accident immediately after we last saw her. She’s got a head injury and is effectively brain dead, even though her body is still doing its thing. Neal realizes what’s happening, remembers some past conversations, and then freezes her with dry ice. He then decides that he can’t live without her, so he freezes himself, too. Everybody around the hospital appears to be okay with this.

We then cut to the future.

You might be noticing that I’m using bolda lot this review where normally I might have used ALL-CAPS. Well, hold on, because I’m about to tell you why.

The future is crazy and weird. Neal is confused by it, but they have the technology to unfreeze him and Marya and, furthermore they have the medical ability to fix Marya’s brain, so it looks like everything’s going to be okay!

Except, well, the future kind of sucks.

Everybody lives in space now. Babies are produced in factories. People are called SYNTHESIANS and they speak a language called STENO, which is basically English but phrases are shortened to something akin to caveman-speak. This fact was actually quite welcome, because the dialogue up to this point had been so stilted and inhuman that it was nice to see an excuse for it come along. People no longer eat, they do something called BALANCING, in which nutrients and carbohydrates are injected directly into the bloodstream.

Notice the all-caps? Those are all over the place in this book. Every mention of every futuristic word is in all-caps. Sometimes the words aren’t that futuristic, though. They’re sometimes words like SHUTTLE or HOSPITAL.

Both emotions and basic biological processes are considered disgusting. Neal gets called a “pig” when he has a wet dream, and Marya suffers the same treatment when she has morning sickness. There’s no privacy, as everything is made of clear plastic. The SYNTHESIANS intend to sterilize our protags and incorporate them into this horrifying culture.

Now, at this point I was getting a pretty good idea of what this book was about. One of the very few facts I could find about the author was that he was born in 1908, and this book was published in 1970, meaning Dreyfuss would have been in his sixties when he wrote it. I began to think that this was a book written by an old man whose views of what are “natural” have begun to be questioned by society. His beliefs on, say, the proper arrangement of the sexes, for example. I’m not going to say that Dreyfuss was necessarily sexist or racist. I don’t have that right. But it’s easy to imagine that, in 1970, this man’s views of the world, especially in those two areas, were beginning to look old-fashioned. Perhaps it earned him insults from the youth of the day. After all, both Neal and Marya are frequently called “pigs” for performing perfectly natural bodily functions, and that was a common insult toward the people in positions of authority during the time he was writing the book.

This book, then, is the result of a member of the Greatest Generation trying to cope with the massive social upheaval of the late sixties and putting it into a science fiction format. I ran with this theory for a while, and while I don’t think I was completely wrong about it, there were some interesting turns coming up.

A lot of this book is exposition. Neal and Marya meet the President at the WHITE HOUSE, where they learn a lot about what’s going on and why the human race has come to this point. In fact, the president is one of the people who made it happen. People are largely immortal now since parts can be replaced without any real problem. In fact, one of my favorite things about this book was that immortality was viewed as a punishment. Every person is required to live at least 200 years, and years are tacked on due to infractions of the rules. The punishment for the most heinous of crimes is eternal life.

The president explains what happened, and it’s a lot of stuff all at once, and a lot of it is either goofy or cringey. About 300 years after Neal and Marya got frozen, things started to really go downhill. There were four major world powers: The United States of America, the USSR, the United States of Africa, and China. America and Russia teamed up against China and took it out. They then joined forces into The United States of Caucasia, allied against Africa.

oh no

While all this was happening, the Earth got mined out. It’s not that resources got scarce. It’s that the Earth was literally being hollowed out. This caused people to want to flee to space, which just exacerbated the problem because it meant that more resources were needed to get them all up there.

Africa finally decided to end it all and set off a nuclear weapon. It was so powerful, and I guess it somehow interacted with the fact that the world was getting hollowed out, that it caused Earth to move in its orbit, after which it froze. This incident is known as EARTH-OUT.

Neal and Marya listen to this and pretty much just ignore it. Neal proposes an idea. He wants to be free of this society, and so he proposes to save it. See, SYNTHESIA has a problem. It has only about 300 years of resources left.

This might be the goofiest thing in this book.

SYNTHESIA produces nearly everything, from its food to its rocket fuel, from coal.

Now, it’d be unfair of me to state that they’re flying coal-powered spaceships and injecting coal into people’s veins, so I won’t do it, even though that’s what I imagined for the entire rest of the novel. No, they use coal to form those things in some magic science way or another. That doesn’t make much more sense. Anyway, they’re running out.

Neal proposes that he and Marya go back to Earth and get coal from there. There’s plenty of it. The president asserts that this is impossible. Neal insists that they be allowed to try. The president tells them that the Earth is a frozen ball of dust and death. Neal still asserts that they try. Finally, the president gives them the opportunity to go to Earth and see for themselves.

Everybody constantly tells Neal and Marya that going to Earth is a stupid idea, and yet they keep clinging to this ill-informed hope that everything will work out. Marya is the more frustrating in this respect, although Neal is by no means off the hook. Marya keeps saying that God will provide. That she’ll pray that they’ll be able to survive. That they’ll be able to find fruit and vegetables and animals and have lots of babies and repopulate the planet. (More on that in a minute.) Her insistence that God will intervene or provide or change things was so very naive that I felt sorry for her. She had a child’s view of God and His tendency to intervene in human affairs. Some people say that’s a good thing (Matthew 18:2-4, Mark 10:15, Luke 18:17) but in this case it was just depressing. Marya’s faith was the equivalent of a child saying that they’ll pray to God to send Grandpa back. You find yourself sympathetic, trying to find the right way to tell them that God just doesn’t work that way, knowing full well that saying that will lead them down the path of “Well, how does God work?” and perhaps to “I guess God doesn’t work at all? Then why does He have to exist?” and the only rebuttal is to say that He works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform and then hope to Him that it gets you off the hook for a while.

Neal’s reaction was just a insistent whine of “Yeah, but we want to try,” which, now that I think about it, is actually worse.

Finally, the president lets them go down to Earth. And yes, Earth sucks. They have to spend thirty days there, just so they get the idea. Also, for no adequate reason, they’re placed in Hitler’s bunker in Berlin? I kid you not! They sleep in Eva Braun’s bed. They rifle through Hitler’s notes in some drawers. Why did that have to happen? Why was the bunker still there? Why were the notes and the bed still there? It’s been 700-plus years!

A lot of this book just sort of happens because, well, why not? It doesn’t have to make sense.

So yeah, there’s no way to get at all that coal on the Earth. I guess everybody’s doomed. Neal and Marya decide that they’d rather die again than get sterilized and inducted into this joyless society, so they try to commit suicide by stepping outside into -100°C temperatures. It freezes them instantly, so they get unfrozen again.

This is where the book takes its weird left turn. Instead of rebelling against the SYNTHESIANS to save them, or anything like that, the couple decides that they rather like it now? It came out of nowhere. They still don’t want to get sterilized, but they have a lot of affection for this society, and SYNTHESIA seems to be okay with that. Why? Where did any of this come from? What is going on?

Neal and Marya still want to find a way to save everybody by getting them their badly-needed coal. They’re already dead set on having lots and lots of babies that can mine enough coal and have more babies that can also mine coal to keep society running until the end of time.

But what about…

I know what you’re thinking

I thought it too

The book mentioned it! And just handwaved it away! Twice, at least, Neal said something like “Well, there’s the incest thing, but nevermind.”

Even Marya, whose dedication to God is absolute, was just all “I guess it’s a sin, but whatever. God will provide.”

Incest is not a good way to start a society! You are medical professionals!

And this book had so many other wonderful and magical technologies that could have avoided the issue! But it was never even mentioned.

So the learnéd minds of SYNTHESIA try to come up with a plan for our couple, whom they now like for no reason. They propose sending them to Alpha Centauri. The response is that Alpha Centauri is too far. Also, the book totally misunderstands how time dilation works and says that while it might only take a few years for our heroes to get there at light speed, thousands of years would pass for SYNTHESIA, by which point it would be long out of coal.

So someone says “What about the SPACE-TIME-WARP?” because apparently that’s a thing. That’s dismissed as being too experimental, but it does let someone use the term OUTER-SPACE-NAUTICS, which sent me into such a spiral of laughter that the cat had to move.

Someone else says “What about teleportation?” But no, that won’t work either.

So somebody says “What about Mars?” It turns out that Mars is such a good idea that it should have been mentioned first, if not at the beginning of the goddamn book.

See, here’s the other goofiest thing in the book. When Earth got nuked and shifted from its orbit, it turned out that it and Mars were aligned in such a way that they swapped places.

This seems like such an important fact that maybe someone could have mentioned it earlier.

Mars is now, get this, a friggin paradise. The SYNTHESIANS can’t go there themselves, because their bodies are now so frail that even Martian gravity would be too much, but the humans can go there and live, no problem.

So that’s what happens. The SYNTHESIANS give them all the materials they’ll ever need. Also, they train them in mental communication, which is another thing that has been in this book all along and nobody really felt the need to mention. The mental communication is little more than the broadcasting of emotions, which is weird because I thought that the SYNTHESIANS were beyond that kind of thing, but there you have it. It’s the most useful possible thing, because our heroes can broadcast feelings like love and friendship and therefore the animals of Mars will happily work for them and make eggs and milk and all that lovely kind of thing. Also, Mars has animals and plants that people can eat. Convenient.

It’s perhaps notable that the training for that kind of emotion broadcasting boiled down to mindfulness meditation. It was all about recognizing what emotions were currently being felt and enhancing the good ones while suppressing the bad ones. I know that’s not exactly what mindfulness is all about, but it was close enough that I was intrigued.

So the heroes go to Mars, and then book takes it’s last turn. This time it’s a turn for the…really sweet?

The last thirty-forty pages of this book are just Neal and Marya on Mars, having babies, loving one another, building a life and a home, and getting to know the native Martians. There’s never a hint of menace, danger, or hardship. The Martians have a problem in that they’re going extinct, but Neal solves it when he finds out that the Martians can’t breed because it’s too hot for them now. He builds them a giant air-conditioned building so they can breed, and that’s the end of the book. I guess the point is that now he’s saved two intelligent species, but it’s not really harped upon in that way and there’s the fact that he really hasn’t yet, he’s just gotten started.

Also, the deal with incest was never addressed.

The book just ends with Marya talking about how lucky they are to be God’s instruments, and that’s it.

I think this book might have been Christian fiction?

I want to make it clear that this was not a good book. Boy howdy. It was baaaaad. I’m perplexed by it, though. At first I thought I’d cracked the nut with my “Greatest Generation can’t understand the Boomers” angle, but in the end, the society turned out to be good? So is that angle still valid? Is it the story of a Greatest Gen fellow who came to accept the social changes of the late sixties and view them as both valid and beneficial? But if that’s the case, why did the heroes then go to Mars and set up a super-traditional new society where Marya stayed home, cooked, prayed, and had babies?

What the hell did I just read?

There was at least one point where Neal thought about the 1960s and how people blew out their eardrums and brains with that damned rock’n’roll music.

But then he founds a society based on friendship and egalitarianism across species where, get this, everything is shared. He founds a commune on Mars where the most powerful weapon that anybody is allowed to wield is friendship.

I am perplexed. I’m not even a little bit angry. This was a new one on me, a book that was incontrovertibly bad, awful even, and yet I can’t help but keep thinking about what it was supposed to mean. In the end it probably wasn’t even supposed to mean anything, it was just a quick paycheck, but still, my socio-historical literary criticism muscle just won’t quit and it’s killing me.

For Sam Durell the action starts with a walk in Rock Creek Park, Washington, D.C.,…and ends in an international race for a trillion-dollar formula.

Along the way he picks up a bevy of beautiful hippies. Together they travel from the lush keys of Florida to the Seven Sin Islands of Singapore.

There Sam hunts for Madame Hung, an Oriental power broker with a taste for debauchery. That’s when the world’s most durable secret agent offers himself as a fly to Madame Hung’s spider.

Then one of the free-loving flower children pulls a super double cross, and Sam is caught by two killers in a torture dungeon—Chinese style.

I found another Assignment— book! It’s been a long while since the last one, Assignment—Star Stealers, and I’ll admit I never had much interest in revisiting this series. What changed my mind? It was 100% the title of this novel. The cover didn’t hurt. Why did Marlo Thomas steal that painting? What’s she doing with a spear gun? Why is she naked, except for sandals? I had to know, dear reader!

I’m sure you’ll be surprised, but Marlo Thomas is nowhere to be found in this novel. There is a quartet of “beautiful hippies” but none of them are described as looking like That Girl. There is, however, a painting, and it’s important. A spear gun also makes an appearance, so that’s nice.

One thing Nuclear Nude had over Star Stealers was that Sam Durell, the protagonist, was better fleshed-out. I might be misremembering, but Star Stealers felt like it had no character development at all. Durell was just…there. He was like a blank human upon which the target reader was supposed to superimpose himself. Nuclear Nude avoided that. We got some character backstory. Sam Durell almost came across as human!

We learn that he’s from the Louisiana bayou, that his callsign is “Cajun,” and that he’s had a lot of adventures. That last bit is hardly surprising, since Nuclear Nude is the 27th in the series. It’s a full three books ahead of Star Stealers, which makes me wonder what happened in between them to cause the quality to suffer so much.

Yeah, Nuclear Nude was a lot better than Star Stealers, but please don’t think that I’m going to say it’s a good book. It’s very problematic. It’s got every stereotype against Asians. It’s gross. It’s Yellow Peril writ large. There’s surprisingly little anti-Communism in this book, although it makes an appearance. No, this is a book about how China is going to take over the world and replace all the white people with Buddha statues or something equally stupid.

Before we know any of that, Sam gets recruited into the situation. A General McFee recruits him to take care of a situation, and is very insistent about it, even threatening Sam with a poison needle in an umbrella until Sam agrees to take on the assignment. It’s a big deal, but it takes a while to figure out why.

The fact that there was a mystery throughout the whole book is what kept me going. Well, that and seeing how horrible it would get. You know me well enough by now that I probably shouldn’t have to say that.

See, a painting has been stolen. It’s not even a notable painting. It’s by some hippie schmuck who is not a good painter, although this one is apparently okay. A fella named Clifton C.B. Riddle, one of the richest men in the world, owns it, and he wants it back. Yeah, so mystery one is figuring out what’s so important about this painting in the first place, seeing as how Riddle spent less than a hundred bucks on it. He gives a standard rich tough guy statement like “When I pay for a thing, it’s mine, and I keep what’s mine, blah blah blah,” but we all know there’s more to it than that.

The painting is called The Nuclear Nude. It is a naked lady surrounded by mushroom clouds and stuff. I bet it’s very tasteful and subtle.

Sam agrees to help find the thing, but he’s quickly intercepted by Riddle’s daughter, Linda. Linda is one of the bevy of beautiful hippies this book is supposed to have. She’s both a MacGuffin and a Refrigerator Girl, which tells you a lot about what’s going to happen. She’s not a Fridge Girl for Sam, though, but instead for some sad sack who follows her around a lot, named Denis, who is a physicist.

I’m probably going to jump around this plot a lot, because a lot happens and I can’t remember exactly what order it was in. There was a consistent narrative, at least, which is unlike a lot of other bad spy thrillers.

Anyway, at some point we find out that Denis created a “formula” that has something to do with neutrinos. Using them as a power source somehow? I have no idea how that’s supposed to work.

Almost as soon as Sam meets C.C.B. Riddle and takes the job, he gets fired from that same job! Sam figures that means something weird is happening, so he continues to investigate. He learns that Riddle has dealings with three of the other richest men in the world, and together, they form the Great Quadrangle of Rich Guy Stereotypes.

We’ve got Riddle, the Texas business magnate who is a big tough guy, mustache and all. Han Fei Wu is basically Fu Manchu, mustache and all. Ulrich van Golz is a Nazi, mustache and all. Yusuf Hadad Fazil doesn’t really play that big a role in the story, but he probably made his money selling opium and heroin from Afghanistan before going legit, and maybe he had a mustache?

Each of these stereotypes have daughters, and I’m going to quote their descriptions verbatim from page 27, because it’ll give you a pretty good feel for everything about this book:

The slim, fair Linda Riddle, the taller, firm-breasted, broad-shouldered Valkyrie, Anna-Lise von Golz, the dark and jewel-like Ryana Fazil, of Turkey, and like a young goddess out of China’s misty youth, the girl named Pan.

This book freakin’ hates semicolons!

When they first meet Sam, they’re naked except that they all wear a necklace with what looks like a sunburst or a sunflower on it. I think it comes up again? They try to stop him from either helping their dads or interfering with their dads, I can’t remember, because everything in this book goes kinda crazy after this, what with double-crosses and so forth.

Not long after Sam investigates Harry, the guy who painted the thing, and Ryana Fazil end up being killed! Oh no!

That galvanizes the rest of the girls, who accompany Sam throughout the rest of the book, more or less. They end up going to Singapore and investigating Sam’s main lead on the painting thief, and it’s none other than the deadly Madame Hung!

Oh no, not Madame Hung!

Okay, so I’m being flip here and a little unfair, because the book totally establishes that Sam and Madame Hung have a history, and it even does it pretty well, considering everything. They met up once before, in Iran. According to the footnote, that was in Assignment—Moon Girl. Madame Hung is all of the Yellow Peril stereotypes about mastermind Asian women. She’s like a spider in her web, etc. She’s also a Dragon Lady , with all that entails. And furthermore she’s sadistic, delighting in torture and destruction and murder and all of those things. Sam is scared of her, and its made clear that he’s got good reason to be, even if all those reasons are GROSS AND AWFUL.

There are all sorts of adventures and close calls in Singapore that aren’t worth relating, even if they made sense at the time. One of the tragic things about this book is that narratively it was pretty good. It had plenty of story elements to enjoy, but the story itself was an offensive mess.

One thing worth mentioning is that Anna-Lise, the Nazi’s daughter, attempts to seduce Sam at one point. She fails, but not for lack of trying, considering that the narrator mentions her “proud breasts” what felt like forty times.

In fact, Sam doesn’t do the Horizontal Safety Dance with anybody in this book! I was expecting it to get gross on that level, too, but nope, it was avoided. It’s noteworthy that Sam doesn’t leer at the girls, either, although the narrator sure as hell does. At its worst, Sam regrets that he’s too old for this stuff.

Sam finally makes his way to Madame Hung’s hideout in some kind of Sin Islands off the coast of Singapore. They square off a bit and it turns out that Madame Hung had already captured Linda and is forcing her to dance in a live-action version of the painting. Also, if she tries to stop or leave she’ll be electrocuted to death. She’s saved by Denis, the physicist guy I mentioned earlier, because, yeah, Refrigerator Girl. Denis, emboldened, is now no longer a liability, and Linda falls in love with him finally.

Uuuugh

The process of rescuing Linda also causes Sam to knock Madame Hung into the electricity box, electrocuting her. In what is the worst possible thing you can ever write at a time like this, Sam basically says “Yeah, she’s dead, and I’m not going to go five steps in that direction to check because I really want to get out of here.”

I mean, I get that you want to keep a villain around, either for a sequel or a surprising climax or whatever. But there are much better ways to write that. Don’t just go “Should I check if she’s dead? Nah. Even if she’s not, she’s humiliated, which is just as good.” Nothing like that. I’ve seen it too many times, in too many books I’ve reviewed, and it’s never, ever not being the most eye-rolling element in the book. Sometimes that’s saying a lot.

I mean, if your villain-who-isn’t-dead is a mastermind like Madame Hung is supposed to be, why not make it a bigger deal that Sam has to get out of there quickly? Like, she was carrying a dead man’s switch, or she hit the TRAP button at the very last second, or she’s still surrounded by goons and Sam is heavily outnumbered and has to run. Something. ANYTHING.

So after that, Sam tracks down where the painting is and goes to find it. Turns out the plane that was supposed to be carrying it to Singapore crashed. He and the girls all go to recover it, but surprise, Madame Hung is also there because she didn’t die. Also, the businessmen from earlier in the book are all there, until they aren’t because somebody kills them. C.C.C.C.C.C.C.B. Riddle survives, though. I can’t remember why, but Anna-Lise also dies at some point? I think it had something to do with being a Nazi.

Also there is a friend of Sam’s, a fella named Red Rod, who is very good at guerilla warfare. He helps a lot.

Finally Sam squares off against Madame Hung again, although this time she has a protégé! It’s Pan, the one we were led to believe was the Lotus Blossom character! It turns out that she’s evil too! Oh no!

Madame Hung gets flung off a cliff somehow, Pan escapes, and the painting is recovered, along with its weird neutrino secrets.

Denis and Linda get married and everybody lives happily ever after, I guess.

ugh

I don’t mind that this book was so convoluted. I did have to leave large swathes of it out of the review, stuff like how Sam is also a member of a super-secret Chinese society called the Five Rubies, which is what allows him to gain entry into a number of places throughout the book. Still, that’s fine. Convolution in a spy novel is pretty par for the course, and Nuclear Nude actually did that okay.

It’s just the overblown Yellow Peril stuff. Thing is, I don’t necessarily feel that Aarons was going for anti-Chinese sentiment in this book. No, he didn’t avoid it, and he sure as hell should have done better, but it’s worth pointing out that every other person in this book was also a stereotypical, stock character. This was just an incredibly lazy book. That doesn’t make it any less problematic, though! It’s definitely a thing worth noting, on a societal level, that when somebody decides not to do any real creative thinking, the default is destructive stereotypes.

Of course, it also doesn’t help the book’s case that Madame Hung was working for Peking the entire time, as well. There’s that wonderful mixture of anti-Chinese sentiment and anti-Communist sentiment that really sets my teeth on edge because it’s racism and jingoism all rolled up into a little ridiculous ball that probably carries a tiki torch or something.

I do wonder about how different this book was from Assignment—Star Stealers. While Nuclear Nude was upsetting and bad, it was a much better-written narrative. Even word choices were better. For instance, Star Stealers used the phrase “lighted a cigarette” several times, which just seemed awkward to me. In Nuclear Nude, someone “lit a cigarette,” and it made a lot more sense.

Also, the previous book had some kind of convoluted scheme that might cost the American government, like, a million dollars, and that was presented as a big deal. It was really laughable. Nuclear Nude has a less convoluted scheme, and the stakes are a little more dire. It’s a matter of trillions of dollars in technological advances, and it makes a little more sense, even if those technological advances make absolutely no sense.

Neutrinos? Seriously?

Near the end, Sam Durell says something like “I don’t even believe in neutrinos,” which might be the dumbest line in the book. Seriously, Sam? By what metric are we supposed to value your opinion on neutrino research? Have you read papers? Talked to scientists? Analyzed the research? No, I know you haven’t, because several times you mentioned that the research was way over your head. I know this is minor point and a tiny quibble, but that bothered the hell out of me. It’s one step away from an ignorant “I don’t believe in neutrinos” to an equally ignorant but far more destructive “I don’t believe in climate change” or “I don’t believe in vaccination.”

The varied answers to that question have proved to be fertile ground for some of the greatest science fiction imaginations. But perhaps we shouldn’t look too closely into the future of cybernetics. It may be that the survival capacity of the thinking machine is greater than that of its maker…

I promise that it’s a coincidence. I did not intend to read a story about robot soldiers on the eve of Memorial Day. It just worked out that way. I’m not complaining, I just wanted you to know.

I say this is a story about robot soldiers, but I’m not accurate on that front. The story is about a singular robot soldier, and it never goes to war. The reason it never goes to war is the point of the story.

I have to admit, this is my first time reading Algis Budrys. He seems like he was a cool guy, and I have two copies of The Falling Torch—a novel that looks up my alley—somewhere around this house.

I also admit that I haven’t the foggiest idea how to pronounce the man’s name. In my head I’ve been pronouncing it a particular way, but it turns out the dude is from Lithuania and I don’t know where to start with that. I just looked up the Lithuanian language and it has stuff like pitch accents. Twelve noun declensions! Baltic languages are so far beyond my linguistic skills I can’t even stand it.

The story takes place from the point of view of the robot, named Pim. Pim is derivative of the robot’s official name, Prototype Mechanical Man I. I guess this is what you’d call an epistolary story, but it’s actually in the form of a diary so there’s probably a more specialized name for it that I can’t find. Furthermore, it’s a robot diary, which itself probably has a specialized sci-fi fandom name. If it doesn’t, I’m calling it right now. It’s called a robo-diaretical epistolaritation. Tell your friends.

Pim’s inventor is a fella named Victor Heywood, whom everyone refers to by surname. This makes sense, because Heywood works for the military. It’s never stated which particular military he works for, which is fine because it doesn’t matter. It also doesn’t matter that the story takes place in 1974, but we get that information anyway. I guess that’s part of the diarist format that is unavoidable, especially with robot diarists. You know what I’m talking about.

Because Pim is the point-of-view character, a lot of the story has him seeing things he doesn’t understand followed by asking Heywood what’s going on. The story has a real “turn to the camera and explain” feel that I wasn’t super keen on, but since it’s a short story I think it worked out okay enough. If it had been a whole novella, I would have screamed. A novel might well have been thrown away.

I was almost ready to say that robots aren’t the point of the story at all and that it has more to do with the military in general, but that’s not accurate either. Still, a large part of the story is, in fact, critical of the military.

Heywood works for a military division called COMASAMPS, which stands for something. His job is to come up with an effective military robot. He has done so, and the problem is that he’s done his job too well. At least that’s what he’s afraid of. As the story progresses, we learn that he didn’t so much do too well as he did just well enough, and that just well enough is the dangerous thing.

The story deals with the fact that Heywood and his robot division are constantly being spied on by the secret intelligence forces of his country’s other branches of the military. I think he works for the army, and so the navy and air force and so forth are keeping tabs to make sure that the army’s not getting a leg-up on them. The word “funding” was never used, but I imagine that’s a large part of the reason for all this intranational espionage.

This reminds me of being very young—four or five or so—and thinking that that’s what war was. A never-ending conflict between the army and the navy and the air force and the marines or whatever. They all just fought each other, all the time. Why would they do that? I dunno. I was a kid.

But tell me this, dear reader: Is the reality any less stupid?

One particular spy, a guy named Ligget, works for the CIC. I assume that’s meant to refer to the Counter-Intelligence Corps, but there are a lot of possibilities, my favorite of which is Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Anyhoozle, Ligget is investigating why Heywood hasn’t made any progress in his robot soldier project. He also thinks that Heywood is purposefully sabotaging the project, so he confronts him.

Thus follows the largely expository part of the story where we learn a lot of what the deal is. Some parts of it were repeats from previously in the story when Heywood would explain things directly to the robot. This is the meat of the story, at least on the robot angle, and it’s a pretty fascinating look at what kinds of concerns a person in 1954 would have when it comes to AI and robotics.

Heywood’s experimentation with Pim has revealed that the only way to create a robot soldier worth the effort, time, and money is to create it as a fully autonomous unit. This unit should be capable of assessing information, making decisions, implementing those decisions, and generally progressing with as little human input as possible. Furthermore, because it’s a robot and all this is a given, it will be smarter, stronger, faster, and more powerful than a human soldier. Again, that part needn’t be questioned. It is a robot.

Heywood tried other setups. A remotely-controlled robot with human input is too slow to be effective. This is probably the issue that seems most awkward in hindsight. Budrys was in the 50s and the only way he could imagine communicating with the robot would be via…what? Magnetic tape? Long wires? Assembly language tapped out in Morse Code?

Telecommunications have come a long way in 60+ years, so this first problem seems to be the one that reality ran with most successfully. This is largely because we decided that building some kind of man-bot wasn’t the best option either. Drone strikes are problematic in a whole lot of ways, but we can’t deny that they work, for both of those reasons.

One of Heywood’s other options was the ability for the robot to accept orders, but not interpret them or modify them. The problem with this setup is largely the human element. The person giving the orders would need to think hard about every possible contingency, which of course would be impossible, so when the robot runs into something that wasn’t expected, it just craps the bed. Or worse, what if the programmer tells the robot to destroy a bunker, for instance, but then forgets to tell it to come home afterward? Or he remembers, but home moves because the enemy took over the base? No bueno.

Ligget catches on quickly, and tells us what the problem is. Again, the problem is an issue with the military mindset, and not one of overarching ethics. Heywood’s solution was to create a robot that was better than humanity in every way. This won’t do: what if the robot decides to take over the war? What then? Oh no, that can’t stand.

There’s the further problem of the robot(s) taking over humanity, but that’s not the point that the story is trying to make. I’m not sure if this was spelled out, but my interpretation was that the top military brass would never ever stand for having their authority taken away by anything, even—especially!—something better at war than they are.

Ligget also sees this as an existential problem, at least. After the lecture, he rants and raves for a while. While he doesn’t say it, I interpreted some of his rant as saying that humanity will find anything better than it, pull it down to its level, and kick it until it dies. This gave me a chuckle.

The story isn’t super clear on what happens at this point, but apparently Ligget tries to destroy the lab and fails because Pim is loyal enough to Heywood to defend him and his stuff. Perhaps there was some self-preservation stuff there, too, which explains the ending of the story. I guess it wouldn’t be possible to destroy Pim because he’s so rad, so the military encases him in concrete and drops him into a river. I wonder why a river and not, say, the Mariana Trench? I guess in case humanity ever changes its mind? And can’t build another robot?

I have a lot of questions about this story, but they have very little to do with its point, which I found intriguing. I’m not sure how much of it is applicable to these modern times where we have AIs generating hilarious Twitter feeds and Bibles while also turning on the bedroom lights, telling me which is the sixth Beatles album (and then playing it), and reminding me to do laundry until I stop ignoring it.

Is it a scarily prophetic story? Nope. Is it a fascinating window into the techno-ethical concerns of 1954? Yeah, largely. Is it a look at the military officer mindset that is relevant to all times of history? Well, I don’t have any direct experience with that, but I’m gonna go with yep.

If I’m disappointed with anything, it’s that the story never once considers the merits of a military robot as a way of preventing human misery. Never once does anyone say “This robot will keep so many of our soldiers alive!” or anything like that. But maybe that’s a problem with me being too idealistic? I mean, war is war, and people are gonna die one way or the other. Robot soldiers are still gonna attack enemy human lives, and those human lives will retaliate against our human lives whether they have robots or not. I guess no war will ever just be robots vs. robots with all the humans safe and sound. And even if that were to happen in some fashion, those robots would still be diverting resources from things like food production, hospitals, and other necessities of human life. After all, that’s the whole point of war. It’s not about killing soldiers. It’s about making things inconvenient enough for the other side that they stop trying to kill your side before they do the same thing to your side.

Oh look, here I am, the day before Memorial Day, talking about how war is bad. Reeeaaaaal controversial opinion there, Thomas.

The Cyborg and the Sorcerers by Lawrence Watt-Evans
Del Rey, 1982
Price I paid:

Slant the Cyborg Warrior had been ordered to kill the enemies of Earth and return with their weapons technology. His robot spacecraft was to see that he did―and kill him if he didn’t.

Problem was―Earth had perished three hundred years before, and no one had told the ship.

Slant’s dilemma seemingly had no solution…then they landed on a strange world where the computer detected “gravitational anomalies.”

Folks, I’m just gonna come right on out and say that I liked this book a lot.

I sort of expected to like it on some certain levels. The title, for one, is totally up my alley. A cyborg and some sorcerers? Those are two of my favorite things! When you put ’em together, there’s no telling what kind of wonder will occur!

What I expected, of course, was some really pulpy, cheesy wonder. I’ve read some other sci-fi/fantasy crossovers and they’re of varying quality. On the one hand we have The Suiciders, which was just tralton dumbo; another hand gives us the Annwn books by George H. Smith, which were fun but also problematic (Irish stereotypes still aren’t funny when they’re in a fantasy land); and on the third hand (because we’re talking about sci-fi), there’s Roger Zelazny, who was a genius.

The hybrid genre comes in two varieties. There are the books that are just fantasy books but someone, somewhere, thought that calling them science fiction would lend them more credibility. Those tend to annoy me a lot. The other lot is where you have a science fiction setting with a science fiction protagonist who just happens to stumble upon some people or a place that has magic. This is what I was talking about earlier, and what we’re dealing with now.

This version is always (in my limited experience) the story of a sci-fi protag who comes across a magical situation. I mention this only because I was struggling to get to sleep last night and tried to imagine a plot where it was the other way around. To wit:

Archmage Flowermuffin was your everyday, run-of-the-mill wizard. Until ONE DAY he found himself trapped in a world wholly unfamiliar to him…

A world of technology, engineering, and the laws of physics.

Now, he needs the help of a Freedok to save his life―and get home. But Steve is nowhere to be found.

FIRST TIME IN PAPERBACK

I tried for at least an hour and couldn’t come up with something that I thought would seriously work. I’m sure someone else has, somewhere. Everything I could think of just turned out to be a ripoff of the classic PC game Arcanum, which, incidentally, deserves a revisit. At the very least, a Fallout 4 mod. Get on that, somebody.

The Cyborg and the Sorcerers also has a great cover going for it. St. Peter is in the front there, being assisted by country-rock superstar Randy Owen. Three guys are like “we’ll catch up later” while the last guy is bad at flying. They are transporting Christ to his tomb outside the walls of Jerusalem.

You know what’s great? The cover represents an actual scene from the book! That’s crazy! What is happening here!?!?

And then we get to the story, which is…just…so well done. It’s so good, everybody. I’m not being ironic, or funny, or anything right now. This book is fine.

I’m not gonna shoot for the moon and say it’s any kind of a lost classic. It’s just that it’s competently done and enjoyable to read. That’s all I ask for!

Our hero is the eponymous cyborg. His name is Slant. He’s been in space for fourteen years…subjective. To an outside observer, he’s been flying around the galaxy for a little over 300 years. His job is to scout out enemies of Earth. Earth had a big ole war with all its colonies. The colonies wanted independence. Pretty standard, but the deal here is that Earth lost, hard, not long after Slant left.

The problem is that Slant is being handled by a computer. The computer’s job is to make sure that Slant is doing his job right. It can take over his body if need be, and if need really be it can kill him by detonating a thermite bomb implanted in his skull. The computer doesn’t know that the war is over. It won’t listen when Slant tries to tell it so. The mission must continue until Slant dies, in which case the computer will self-destruct. Slant is beginning to suspect that the computer is putting him in dangerous situations on purpose so that it can off itself.

Slants wanderings bring him to a planet that used to be an Earth colony, and therefore an enemy. This planet was pretty obviously nuked to the gills back during the war, but the computer doesn’t care. There are “gravitational anomalies” that might suggest a weapon that could be used against Earth. Investigation is imperative. So Slant investigates.

The planet has a civilization trying to rebuild itself. It’s got a sort of medieval thing going on. There are also wizards. That part becomes apparent pretty quickly. The wizards can fly, can change the weather, can tell if a person is lying. They probably have plenty of other abilities, too. What’s undeniable is that their magic works. It’s pretty crazy. The computer refuses to believe what’s going on, and keeps insisting that there are gravitational anomalies and that the wizards are probably using some kind of weapon that can be used against Earth so they must be investigated.

90% of the conflict in this book is between Slant and his computer. This is good. The computer can make him do things he doesn’t want to do. Several times throughout the book he is forced to kill people because the computer interprets them as a threat even though they aren’t really, or because the computer wants to study their brain to see how the magic works, or whatever. Slant hates it, but there’s nothing he can do about it.

About halfway through the book Slant’s actions garner him enough attention that some wizards decide to put a stop to it. He can’t explain to him that the computer is making him do these things, since the computer will interpret that as an act of surrender and kill him. The wizards use their wizard powers to disable his ship and the computer with it. Slant is free.

One thing that made this book work is that while it was a little longer than most of the paperbacks I do―sitting at about 250 pages―it didn’t ramble around from adventure to adventure like so many of this kind of book would. Yeah, there’s a lot of travel, and Slant goes to some far-flung places, but there’s a solid story here flowing through each adventure, not some series of adventures that kill wordcount until the final battle.

Slant runs across an apprentice wizard named Ahnao. She was the apprentice of a wizard that Slant was forced to kill so he could take his head to the computer for study. Slant begrudgingly takes her under his wing. He spends a lot of time thinking about how useless she is. She can’t ride a horse or set up camp, and her magic is barely usable, so what good is she? I worried that the answer would be sex, but I was relieved to see that it was not.

They do eventually do The Horizontal Thriller, but there’s a little more to it than most books. Ahnao makes the first move, which causes Slant to respond automatically. See, he’s got these extra personalities grafted onto his own as part of his training. There’s a combat personality, for instance, as well as a spy one and several others. They’re meant to help him respond automatically to survival situations. One of those personalities is apparently sex-haver.

Other than that one scene, there is no romance between the two characters. There wasn’t really romance there, either. For Slant’s part, it was entirely mechanical, albeit perfect. A parody of lovemaking. Here, like in many other points of the book, he is ashamed of himself, even though it’s not really his fault.

Slant and Ahnao head to a big city and meet some more wizards. They get to live in a wizard tower for a while (it’s an abandoned skyscraper from the Bad Times). Here and before there were some explanations of “magic” in this world, but I have to give the author a lot of credit for not babbling on about it for super long. It’s not quite handwaved, either. Basically, magic is the ability to perceive the invisible forces of the world―gravity, for example―and interact with them. This is a result of a particular modification of brain structure. Anyone can have their brain modified so that they, too, can be a wizard, but it must be done by another wizard. There are lots of rules about apprenticeship and so on that keep the world from being chock full of wizardry.

Slant speculates that it’s probably some form of psionics that came about as a mutation after the planet was nuked by Earth. Somebody came out with a weird brain that let them do magic, they figured out they could change somebody else’s brain, and it spread from there. Simple and straightforward, but not necessarily the end-all-be-all of the thing. There is a sequel to this book.

While Slant is free of the computer’s influence, he is also free to tell people the truth of the situation. It’s hard for many to believe that he’s a spaceman with a bomb in his head and a computer that made him do some terrible things, but they come around. He makes friends with a wizard named Arzadel, who thinks he can find a way to get the bomb out of Slant’s head. Before it’s managed, though, the computer comes back on, much to Slant’s surprise and dismay.

Slant now has to be careful again. His companions get the idea pretty quickly, which was nice. I hate it when the plot can only move forward because everybody is stupid. Nobody is stupid in this book. I really like that.

It turns out that the computer was able to get enough power going to reactivate itself, whereupon it was able to set up some solar panels. Once it has enough power to turn on the ship’s drive, it’ll come pick him up and kill a bunch of people in the meantime. Slant really doesn’t want that to happen. He tries to get the computer to stay where it is, but it refuses. The computer also refuses to let him leave the city he’s found. If Slant comes down out of the wizard tower, he leaves the computer’s line of sight for communications, which makes the computer mad. Everything is looking bad.

It gets worse when a bunch of wizards show up to remove the thermite from Slant’s head. The computer ignites the bomb just as the wizards are able to get it removed, but it’s still close enough to Slant’s head that it wounds him bad. The computer, now convinced that Slant is dead, can self destruct, but orders are that it has to destroy as many enemy installations as it can before doing so. Because the people of this planet are helpless, the ship can easily destroy them all before self-destructing.

The book winds down as a race against time. Slant needs to get to the computer to deactivate it before it is able to take off and blow stuff up.

Oh, something I forgot to mention: When the ship powered down near the middle of the book, an automatic recording came on that told Slant how to deactivate his own cyborg programming and, if necessary, the computer’s control on him. The problem is that Slant can’t do it remotely. He has to get back to the ship to turn it off.

The override code, incidentally, is Slant’s civilian name spoken three times. The process that made Slant a cyborg deliberately made it difficult to remember his previous life, but the very beginning of the book had an offhand comment about how he was once able to remember his name so he wrote it down on a piece of paper and put it inside of a book. At first I assumed this to be a Chekov’s Gun, but it was cleverer than that!

This novel is full of surprises!

Slant is unable to get back to the ship by himself, especially since that bomb went off next to his head, so some wizards fly him there. Time is ticking.

The Chekov moment comes about when he gets back onto the ship and begins looking for the slip of paper with his name on it. It turns out he has a lot of books! And a lot of them have slips of paper with stuff written down on them! It’s super relatable!

And it only serves to waste precious time looking!

The ship takes off. Miraculously, Slant remembers that his name is Sam Taylor and gives the override. Now the problem is that the ship is actually flying and he just shut down the computer that controls it. He’s going to crash and explode and die, but at least it’s just him and not the cool wizard planet.

Nuts to that, says he! He tries various methods of controlling the ship, all to limited avail. Near the end, he gets some tingly feelings and is able to slow the ship down just enough that it doesn’t kill him when it crashes. His wizard buddy shows up to rescue him and says that Slant was a wizard all along!

Just kidding. Slant was really a wizard for, like, an hour. Arzadel says that while the other wizards were getting the thermite bomb out, they figured it would help things a lot of they modified his brain to make him a wizard too, but decided not to tell him until he was finished with the space ship since it might have been too distracting.

That’s the end of the book.

Boy howdy, I did go on! There was a lot going on, and I liked almost all of it.

Best I can figure, I have exactly one criticism of the book, and it’s that most of the people in it had the same voice. Slant was a good character to follow in his omniscient third-person kind of way. He had a good voice and some personality and was a likable character. Everybody else just sort of sounded the same, though. It wasn’t a turnoff, but it did make it hard to distinguish all the characters besides the main one. I had to consult the book several times while writing this review to figure out who was who.

Is that it, though? I think it is! Find this book and give it a try! If it’s up your alley the way it was mine, I think you’ll like it.

There’s a sequel, which I intend to find and read. The author, Lawrence Watt-Evans, is pretty prolific. He’s got a lot more fantasy than sf, as far as I can tell, and he’s still writing and getting stuff published. He’s active on Twitter, too, and seems like a cool guy. He’s also written some tie-in fiction for Star Trek: DS9 and Voyager, which intrigues me. Also Spider-Man? Neat.

Earth’s elusive masters tolerated only one planet-wide organization—the Scarlet Order of Men. Only the most favored of the People could enter the Institute, as children, to undergo rigorous training. Those unfit for the Order became Blue Brethren, servants and guides of the People, aiding and instructing them as loyal members of society, under the rule of the benevolent Trisz.

First things first: the cover to this book is quite good. I like it. There’s not a lot going on, but there’s an attention to detail that I appreciate. The guy up front is well-rendered. I don’t know what all that sciencey looking stuff laying around is. This cover doesn’t have much at all to do with the book. Probably Ed Emshwiller had it lying around and sold it to Airmont—a publisher I’m wholly unfamiliar with—for a couple bucks.

I like the person in the background who is all “Heyooooooo.”

The back cover is notable for giving us little to no plot information at all. The details are accurate enough, but there’s not much on what to expect from this novel.

Manly Banister, who has an excellent name, only published this one novel. He also had some short stories, but he’s known more for his five-issue fanzine The Nekromantikon in the fifties. One thing I regret is being born after the era of fanzines. I’m sure they exist in some form or another today, mostly online, but pre-Internet fandom is more fascinating to me. I have to wonder if it was as toxic as fandoms today. These rose-colored glasses I just picked up tell me it wasn’t. Let’s be honest, though, we all know there were numerous instances of published letters that went

“Dear Weirdzine, my name is Mary U. and I just wanted to make some comments on the recent “At the Mountains of Madness.” I thought that it—”

“Hold up there, Mary! Don’t you know that if women read Weird fiction, it makes their uteruses fall out!?! Get back in the kitchen!”

I’m being flip and reductive and a lot of women were forefront in fan culture, including responder-to-the-blog and Sime/Gen creator Jacqueline Lichtenberg, but I can’t shake the feeling that some things have always been the same.

So what does Conquest of Earth have to say for itself? That’s a tough question, it turns out, but at least we can rest assured that what it does have to say, it says with a lot of purpleness. It’s not as bad as plenty of the pulp I’ve read before, but boy howdy. There’s no mistaking the influences on this one.

Our hero is Kor Danay. He’s twenty-five and perfect in mind and body. When we meet him, he’s being inducted into a group of people called the Scarlet Brotherhood, or the Scarlet Order of Men, or the Scarlet Sages, or whatever. It seems to have a bunch of names, but the chief thing that people are called when they’re admitted to the Order is just Men. That…probably says a lot about what book we’re reading.

Kor is ready for his final exam. The exam happens, and we get a taste of what the Scarlet Sages are capable of. It turns out to be a lot. A lot a lot. Kor’s final exam has him be teleported to another world somewhere in the universe. He has to figure out where he is and teleport himself back to the exact spot that he left. For full points, he has to complete this in 3.2 seconds.

We see Kor utilize the abilities at his disposal. He slows down the passage of time. He expands his consciousness until he is able to hear the ticking of his instructor’s stopwatch from what turns out to be about 3000 light years away. And then he teleports himself back. In all, he does it in a little over a second.

So yeah, the Scarlet Sages have some incredible abilities at their disposal. But there’s more! It turns out that Kor is the best one of them all, because of course he is. There is an ability theoretically possible to Scarlet Sages, although none have ever attempted it and survived. It involves calling what is referred to as “The Fire Out of Heaven.” All initiates are invited to try this skill at their final examination, although failure means death.

Kor doesn’t fail. He’s the first to manage it. It’s explained that this has something to do with his “uniquely separable mind.” A “superconsciousness” is mentioned. It seemed a lot like a subconscious. It’s where intuitive logic comes from. Kor’s ability, then, comes from being able to willingly throw information into his superconscious mind and let it take care of itself without needing things like logic or language to get in the way.

I kinda like that. This book dealt a lot with things “beyond language” in a way that would probably have made Lovecraft proud, although at least when Manly Banister mentions that something is indescribable, he doesn’t immediately proceed to attempt to describe it.

Kor, his abilities proven, is sent out into the world to serve as a Scarlet Sage. The main rule is that he’s not allowed to use his powers, lest people find out they exist. The main problem is whether the Trisz find out these powers exist.

The Trisz rule Earth, and many other planets besides. Their arrival on Earth has been lost to time. The book never states when it takes place, but we get some clues that say it’s pretty damn far in the future. The sun has gone red, for instance. The moon is coming closer to the Earth and even approaching the Roche limit, where it will break up and form a ring. Now, current science says that this is something unlikely to ever happen (the moon is actually getting further away), but I’m willing to give a book from the fifties a pass on that one.

The Trisz are “utterly inhuman.” They’re not even corporeal. They’re barely even visible. Most people in the world are pretty chill with Trisz rule. The Scarlet Sages are not. Their main deal is that the Trisz are holding humanity’s development back. Humankind would be even more powerful than the Trisz by now, they argue, if they hadn’t interfered. There’s also the fact that the Trisz, for some reason, are carting off the water from Earth to some unknown destination. Earth is drying up. Never mind that there’s plenty of water elsewhere in this very Solar System that would probably be a lot easier to sweep up. Saturn’s rings aren’t exactly doing much at the moment.

Jumping ahead, we later learn that there’s only one Trisz, and all of the ones humans have ever seen are just projections of it. Also, that Trisz resides in a different universe, and it is the only thing in that universe. It feeds on life energy, because of course it does, but that doesn’t explain the whole water thing. It does explain why it’s actively helping humans colonize the galaxy, though. More food.

The Scarlet Sages know a lot of this stuff, but not everything, and they’ve sent scouts out through the universe to try to find the Trisz homeworld. (They don’t know yet that it’s a different universe.) Kor is a little disappointed that he’s not destined for the Scout Brigades, but is instead sent to a place called Ka-Si to just chill out for a while.

So this book does a thing that I like, but the only reason I like it is because it’s so cheesy and corny and hacky. I especially like it when I don’t realize it’s happening for a while, which is what happened here.

Okay, so Kor is in Ka-Si. I didn’t think anything about the name of this city at first. I thought that it seemed a little King James Old Testament, but that was fine. But later we learn that Ka-Si is on the river Mizzou. Is it starting to hit yet? It didn’t hit me yet. It hit me when it was stated that the Mizzou eventually flowed into the river Mis-Pi.

And yeah, that’s where it hit me. They’re in Kansas City. This book does the thing where even far in the future, places have the same names but shifted around. Add some hyphens, trim some syllables, modify some consonants, you’ve got yourself some newfangled place names. Never mind that it’s likely been millions of years and that place names are often unrecognizable (or changed completely) within decades or centuries. It amuses me deeply.

Later, we enter the city of Den-Ver.

I’m serious. I didn’t make that up. That’s all Manly.

Kor’s adventures are numerous and it’s clear that this book was a fixup of some novellas. I’ve learned to accept that in theory, but it doesn’t make the book much more entertaining to read. In other books, things get recapped a little too often to make for a good novel, but this time it was the opposite problem. You could tell where the pieces were stitched together because there were big shifts in plot that didn’t have an awful lot to do with things like cause and effect.

Kor shows up in Ka-Si. He meets a woman named Soma and a Blue Brother named Pol. The Blue Brothers are teachers and tutors and stuff, people who were almost worth making Scarlet Sages but didn’t quite hack it. At first they seem to be working against him, but it turns out they’re on his side. Kor runs up against the “benevolent” Trisz on a few occasions, avoiding murder not once but twice. The second time is a good little doozy. He’s thrown into some kind of matter converter. The manages to teleport himself out (he’s allowed to use his powers if it’s a life-or-death thing, conveniently), and then teleports inindividual molecules from across the city that add up to the exact chemical composition of his body, thus fooling the Trisz.

Did I mention that Kor is ludicrously powerful? I mean, wow.

Kor and Soma fall in love (because of course they do) and then another big shift happens. This is the biggest one and it was so out of place. The Scarlet Sages recognize Kor for his efforts and skills and decide to send him and Soma off into the galaxy to look for a planet worth colonizing. The couple have a grand old time until their last day, when Soma gets snatched up by a Trisz that happened to be wandering past. Kor’s mind snaps and we get about twenty pages of him wandering around the wilderness of this primitive planet, meeting up with some Stone Age natives and hanging around with them, and then finally being found and brought home by his fellow sages, where he recovers without a problem.

This does apparently matter to the story, because Kor says that it was while he was wandering around like this that he figured out everything he needs to know in order to bring the book to a close. Yeah, there are about twenty pages left, and they’re a pretty big letdown. Basically, Kor says he realized how he’s able to call The Fire From Heaven (which, incidentally, just seems to be pulling stuff out of a star), what his “uniquely separable mind” is all about, and what the Trisz are and how to defeat them.

So the end of the book is him explaining this for a bit, and then the last five pages are everybody putting a plan into action with no setbacks and the Trisz are destroyed the end.

Did I like this book? That’s a hard question, actually. Yeah, the ending sucked, but it stood out as a perfectly serviceable pulp novel until that point. It had a lot of the same problems that plenty of pulps do:

Bad prose

An overarching concern with Manhood

One woman

She ends up being a woman in a fridge

A rambling plot with little flow

An awful ending

No chance of the hero failing

But it was also pretty original compared to plenty of pulp. The Scarlet Sages, and Kor especially, were insanely powerful, but the powers were interestingly considered and consistent. The book had some things to say about the nature of conqueror vs. conquered, about power and how tyrants strive to keep it, and so on. It was pretty relevant to the modern day, at times. The Trisz act benevolent but keep their controlled populations uneducated and squabbling so that they never serve as a threat to their power. Sounds familiar!

I’m not gonna say you should pick up this book unless you’re looking for a real pulpy deep dive, but I’m also not going to tell you to run away from it, either. It’s got some things worth thinking about and pulling from if you can get through all the rest of it. Golly gee, that’s the whole reason I started this blog!

“Two-Handed Engine” by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore
from The Metal Smile, ed. Damon Knight
Belmont Science Fiction, 1968
Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1955
Price I paid: none

“DO NOT FOLD, BEND, OR MUTILATE”

marked the beginning of our cybernetic society. How will it end?

The varied answers to that question have proved to be fertile ground for some of the greatest science fiction imaginations. But perhaps we shouldn’t look too closely into the future of cybernetics. It may be that the survival capacity of the thinking machine is greater than that of its maker…

I was going to read a novel this week, but things got super busy, so let’s dip back into the old book of robot short stories and see what we’ve got today, shall we?

Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore are two names I recognized but I couldn’t tell you from where. If you’d asked, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you anything they’d written, either together or apart. I might have guessed that they were a married couple, but only after I’d been told that Moore was a woman. Such is the shame of an overwhelmingly male genre where women had to go by their initials to have any hope of publication. I know that’s not 100% true, but it’s too true.

Wikipedia tells me that Kuttner and Moore met after he sent her a fan letter, thinking that she was a man. So there you go. I wonder if things like that still happen? I like stories like that. Not necessarily the “thought she was a man” part, but the idea of two authors meeting up because they like each other’s work and then getting married and then writing together. We’ve seen a few similar of those kinds of things on this blog, with mixed results, and it still tickles me.

This story was a lot longer than the others from this collection I’ve read, pushing about twenty pages. The cover to the original F&SF called it a “novelet,” which I don’t think is a word we use much anymore. There may be longer ones ahead of me but I haven’t checked. The story itself was pretty fine. I think it had a lot more going for it in terms of worldbuilding than plot, but the plot good in its own way.

I did try a little experiment when I was reading this. It’s going to sound a little silly to most of you, but I hope you’ll bear with me. I’ve said before that I have a hard time with my visual imagination. It’s just not very good. I don’t find it easy to picture things in a book as they’re progressing. I don’t see this as a major problem, but it is a thing that I’m aware of.

For this story I decided to exercise that part of my brain with a bit more intention. Usually I just read a thing and be done with it. Today, I made a very conscious effort to imagine things as they progressed in the story. I cast the characters so that I could imagine them more concretely. I searched for clues to mise en scène.

It was neat! It took forever!

Most of this story follows a guy named Danner (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson). We first meet Danner eating fancy food in a fancy restaurant. We get a little of his backstory.

Danner was asked to kill somebody by a guy named Hartz (Steve Buscemi). Danner did so, and Hartz was able to move up in his organization, which is the organization that punishes people for doing bad things. Hartz promised Danner that there would be no consequences, and as the story progresses, we find out what those consequences were supposed to be and, as things turn out, are.

That’s where the worldbuilding comes in. Most of this story hinges on it, which is fine, because when it comes to sci-fi short stories, that’s pretty par for the course. It’s very easy for me to worldbuild and harder for me to put a story in that world. I’m sure this is a common problem, and it would be hypocritical of me to call people out on it.

Of course I call people out on it all the time. I’m in a good mood today.

The world of this story is far in the future. We don’t get how far, but there are hints. We learn that some things have been in place for centuries, for instance. One of those things is robots.

People invented robots and managed to get rid of want and hunger and the need for work. After the robots took over everything for people, society crumbled. All human relationships were forgotten, from the nation-state down to the family unit. People didn’t need other people any more, and the social parts of our brains atrophied.

I think that’s a good setup, even though I have some questions over if that could happen over the course of centuries or if it might need longer than that. We’re a sociable species, and it might take a while for us to get over that.

The upshot of that social atrophy is that humanity came to the verge of extinction. Maslowe’s Hierarchy was taken care of, albeit in an artificial way that replaced bits of it instead of fulfilling them. Our inbuilt need for human relationships, for instance, has a lot to do with perpetuating the species. But if you live in a robot chair all your days and it can take care of those needs with holograms and squishy pillows, what’s going to happen to humanity?

Ugh, this is starting to sound like a NoFap screed. Like, I get where all this is going, but at the same time, I feel like somebody was reading this story and said to themselves, “Right! Porno is bad!” and started a crusade.

Credit: isfdb.org

Finally, somebody recognized that humankind was in trouble and figured out that a plan needed to be formulated. They got together with some robots and asked the robots to lay off for a bit so that the species could get back on its feet. All the luxuries went away. But that didn’t fix much.

Because all the social muscles had atrophied, so had the very idea of a conscience, or even a sense of guilt. Something had to be done. It was decided that the only true crime was murder, so that was the only thing that would need to be punished. That’s where The Furies— named for the creatures of vengeance in Ancient Greek literature—come in. They are humanity’s replacement for guilt until we can grow that part of our brains back.

This is the part of the story that I liked so much. Danner spends most of the story being chased by a Fury, and so that’s where we learn a lot about what they’re supposed to do and how they work. They’re just humanoid robots, and all they do is hang around a person who has committed a murder. They’re unstoppable, but on the whole, they don’t do anything. When the murderer walks around, they will forever hear the footsteps of the robot behind them. When they sleep, the robot is there. It’s inescapable.

We’re told that eventually the robot executes the criminal, but we’re never given any concrete details on that. Based on the rest of the story, I’m led to believe that this never happens, and the criminal will go insane and take his or her own life.

Back to Danner. He committed a murder on behalf of Hartz. Hartz assured Danner that he had come up with a way to scramble a Fury’s circuits. Make it give chase to somebody else, or something. Danner believed him. It turns out that Hartz is a liar and does no such thing.

Danner spends a lot of the story trying to get away from his Fury and going mad. He spends a lot of time in the library trying to figure out if there’s a way to get rid of the thing. That’s where he comes across the line from Milton’s “Lycidas” that gives us the title of the story. Finally he gets an idea. He finds a gun and forces his way into Hartz’s office, where Hartz kills him pretty much immediately.

The point of view shifts to Hartz now. He’s just committed a murder. It turns out that in this future society, murder is murder, no matter what the intention. Self defense is no defense. He also committed his murder in full view of a Fury.

It turns out that Hartz does have the ability to turn a Fury away from its target, and he uses it, but the ending of the story takes an interesting twist.

Hartz realizes that the one thing keeping humanity from wiping itself out is the justice system and its use of Furies. He just corrupted it. He just broke it. He may have destroyed humanity’s last hope of survival.

And he feels guilty about it.

That’s so good! I love it! Like any good ending, it makes me want to know so much more. What’s next and next and next. I don’t often get to see endings I like. They’re a rare commodity, but I think they’re easier to do in a short story since with books there are all these bigger expectations after spending so much time with it. Stories don’t need any kind of return to the status quo or denouement or anything like that. They can get to the point and hit us with it.

Is Hartz among the first re-emergence of guilt-feeling humans? Is he proof that there’s hope after all? Or will the sense of guilt lead him to commit suicide? The end of the story likens the feeling to having an invisible Fury behind him, one that only he knows is there, and we have a good idea of what happens to the people who are followed by Furies.

Is this a happy ending? Dude just killed a guy after lying to him so that the other guy would kill another guy. He’s pretty despicable. And yet, it turns out that he’s our indication that, in the context of the world of this story, there’s hope for humanity yet.

Is there a moral? I don’t know. I feel like maybe there’s one somewhere and I’m not finding it, or finding the right way to articulate it, but that it’ll come to me later today when I’m hunting in the freezer for a popsicle.

What a good ending.

It’s a good story and it’s been reprinted about a million times, so you shouldn’t have much trouble finding it if you want to read it for yourself. I think it’s worth it, even though I gave away most of what happened. It’s a story well-told, and that’s its own reward, even if you know what happens.

Thirty years in the future, the ultraviolent sport of Professional Street Football, a phenomenally popular 24-four-hour-long athletic event, combines pro football with mixed martial arts and armed combat. On New Years day, quarterback T.K. Mann plays the most dangerous game of his life, the game known as Killerbowl!

(Synopsis from Goodreads)

I’m not sure if I’ve ever talked about it before, but I’m just not much of a sports guy. I think the most relevant sports fact I’ve committed to memory is that Roger Maris hit 61 home runs in ’61, and I only know that because a relative was born that year and told it to me once. I’m also not the sort to mock somebody for being a sports fan. You do you. They’re just not my jam.

What I do love are stories about murdersports. It’s probably because the narrative of any murdersports story is just highlighting all of the things about sports that make me uncomfortable and then cranking them up to eleven. They’re not just satirizing sports. The genre takes on everything from the nature of masculinity to capitalism to the toxicity of fan and consumer culture to the frightening human thirst for bloodletting to the mass media’s ability to control how we think and feel.

I wonder what the first story of this ilk was? Could there be some lost Roman work about a mega-colosseum where mega-gladiators…do…something? I can’t think of a way to inflate the frightening aspects of the Roman games because they were already ludicrously violent. I’ll chalk that down to a personal failing.

And in the modern era we’ve got Rollerball (1975, the same year as Killerbowl), The Running Man (book: 1982, movie: 1987), The Long Walk (1979), Death Race 2000 (holy crap that movie is also from 1975), and probably a bunch more that I’m missing all the way down to The Hunger Games, plus the occasional sequel or remake of things already mentioned.

The American People like sports, and we also like satires about how much we buy into the negative aspects of sports. Do we realize that, though? I’m not sure how many people checked out Roger Corman’s new Death Race 2050 because they were looking forward to dark satire and political commentary. I think we just like it when shit blows up and a lot of people die.

Look at me repeating old George Carlin bits.

Anyway I said that I don’t mock people for being sports fans, but the whole damn thing is really problematic. I only bring that up to acknowledge that it’s not that much worse than most other fandoms. I’m probably just as likely to be spat on by a stranger for not caring about the Atlanta Falcons as I am for not caring about anime.

Rant over.

So Killerbowl is about a fella named T.K. Mann, the quarterback for the San Francisco Prospectors. The Prospectors are a street football team. We learn about street football as the book progresses, and it’s got some…interesting aspects. The “field” is multiple city blocks. Plays can involve smashing through storefronts and stuff. Plays can also involve outright murder. Players have clubs and knives, depending on their position. Injured players have to stay on the field until the quarter is over. Games last twenty-four hours. One player has a sniper rifle. Death, destruction, and mayhem are the entire point.

We don’t learn an awful lot about the world outside of the SFL. Mostly it’s tantalizing clues. Pollution is rampant, gas is so expensive that nobody uses cars anymore, and the federal government has purchased large swathes of land for food-growing purposes. I didn’t get a great sense of how the economy was doing outside of SFL stuff, but honestly, when prices for things were listed I thought they seemed a little cheap. Maybe our author underestimated the power of inflation, or maybe it was intentional. No big deal. A lot of people seem to be broke a lot of the time.

Did I mention who our author is? Gary K. Wolf, author of the extremely good Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, upon which the movie you’re thinking of was loosely based. It’s a fine, fine novel, well-written and fun to read. I’ve been meaning to read some of his other books, like The Resurrectionist or the more recent Space Vulture, but haven’t gotten around to them yet.

He should not be confused with science fiction critic Gary K. Wolfe. I have also been known to confuse him with Gene Wolfe on occasion. Sorry, confused library patrons!

T.K. is good at street football, but he’s also starting to age out of it. At a ripe old 34, he’s probably the oldest player in a game for younger men. He’s also a swell guy in a game based around toxic masculinity. He’s not perfect, but, for example, a lot of his salary goes to paying rent on his parents’ old house. His parents are long since passed and are buried on the land that belonged to them for a long time. The government bought the land for farming at some point, but T.K. rents the house from them at an exorbitant price.

The story was told in an almost nonlinear way that worked well. It would bounce back and forth between Super Bowl XXI, on January 1, 2011, and the events of the year leading up to it. In the backstory, we learn about what’s motivating T.K. to play in the Super Bowl. He has a grudge against the quarterback for the opposing New England Minutemen, Harv Matison. Harv is an enormous douchebag, for one thing, but he’s also widely perceived as T.K.’s main rival. Harv plays the game recklessly, literally sacrificing his players to make big plays. One of the stats tracked in this game are the number of players a QB loses, and Harv has an average of four of his players killed per game. T.K. plays more conservatively and loses fewer players, but the people who make money off of the whole thing are starting to resent him for keeping the violence down. For this reason, Harv is a fan favorite while T.K., despite being an excellent player, is becoming something of a joke.

We learn as the story progresses that there’s more to it than that. Harv is cheating. He’s cheating on behalf of IBC, the network corporation that runs the SFL. Its president, Pierce Spenser, holds that audiences want even more bloodshed. They don’t care who wins or loses, they just want to see people get maimed and killed on live TV. His big plan is to recruit one player from every team who will receive extra information so that they can have big plays that lead to mayhem. This amounts to a speaker in their head, relaying information on the state of the game while they play.

When T.K. learns about this development, he has to deal not only with the fact that Harv is the cheat for the Minutemen, but with the fact that there’s somebody on his own team that is cheating, too. He doesn’t know who it is, and that bothers him.

Every chapter of the backstory bits is titled with the date. I’ve never seen a book structured like this. Parts of the book are counting down to other parts of the book while each occurs simultaneously as part of the narrative. The bits taking place during Super Bowl XXI are also on a sort of countdown, because they’re titled with the time of day, telling us how much time is left in the game because SFL games are played from midnight to midnight. We get suspense from two angles, and it works just fine.

T.K. struggles with the fact that this clandestine information cost the life of one of his oldest friends, Eddie Hougart, at the hands of Harv Matison. He’s approached by a group of people who want to stop the SFL altogether, a group led by Senator Cy Abelman (D-Oregon). T.K. promises to help them, but only after Super Bowl XXI is over and he gets his revenge on Harv. This perplexes and upsets Senator Abelman. Abelman has proof that something fishy is going on at IBC. His efforts to expose the plan are defeated by a conspiracy, though, that leaves him the laughing stock of the nation. IBC knows that T.K. was working with them (he’s been banging a woman who works for them, unknown to him), and they set about making sure that he gets killed in a game.

Interspersed with the story are little bits of ephemera. News articles, television transcripts, and even a scholarly journal (generously funded by a grant from IBC), all of which argue not only the SFL is harmless entertainment, but that in some cases it’s essential to the health of the nation. There’s all this babble about how people need an element of risk and excitement in their lives, something that SFL provides for them vicariously. Without SFL, argues the scholarly journal, people would begin to go insane. Some in the media go so far as to argue that the people who oppose the SFL, people like Senator Abelman, are in favor of the destruction of the human race.

The final pages of the book, now that we’re all caught up, take place during Super Bowl XXI and immediately afterward. Most of the football stuff that comes up has been covered before, and it’s really satisfying.

what is wrong with me

The game is tight. Players keep getting lost on both sides. This is almost entirely Harv Matison’s fault. He sacrifices his own players to showboat, but he also kills T.K.’s players because he has insider information. T.K. himself gets seriously injured, enough that he should, by all rights, be taken out of the game. His arm is completely mangled. I believe he fell off a building. He grits his teeth and re-enters the game, though. The remaining players are Harv Matison for the Minutemen, T.K. and his sniper (actually a “hidden safety”) for the Prospectors. T.K. realizes that this means his hidden safety is the spy or narc or cheater or whatever you want to call it.

This character’s name was D’Armato more often than not. Sometimes it was D’Amato. This Kindle edition had some serious OCR issues. Words would be misspelled, letters and numbers would get swapped around (a player with the number I0, for instance, was not uncommon), and sometimes, for no reason at all, sentences would decide that they were written in subscript. To make things worse, the epilogue to the book had some scanned images of text to help preserve formatting. Some of that scanned text consists of team rosters. In that scanned text, which I would assume is immune to OCR problems and comes from the paperback itself, the character’s name is “D’Armatto.”

T.K. kills his own player and takes his gun. That’s his right as quarterback. He tracks down Harv Matison, who has a total baby wetpants reaction. If T.K. kills Harv, he wins the game. That’s another one of the rules. If one team is killed off entirely, the other team wins, no matter what the score. T.K. can win it all right here.

He chooses not to. He marches Harv off the field to the mobile studio, where he threatens everyone in there, including the head of IBC who is running things. He gets them all to confess, on air, that they’ve been cheating and fixing games, leading to real, actual human deaths, to make more money. And then he leaves.

Did T.K. win? It’s up in the air. We don’t see any real resolution to this. In fact, what little we get points in the other direction. The end of the story is a cut to a husband and wife watching the game on television. They are both infuriated that the game was cut short by T.K.’s actions. They are both confused and annoyed that T.K. used their precious time as viewers to make some kind of speech. The male of the couple peppers his speech quite thickly with homophobic slurs. He also decides to write his senator to complain about this turn of events. He goes to bed and then writes that letter the next day.

And that’s the end of the book.

Great big cynical ending? Yeah, that’s what I think. True to life? Arguable, but I’m willing to err on the side of the affirmative. Some days I don’t have a lot of faith our crazy old species, and today is one of those days. This is what happens when I read Twitter.

So it’s a depressing ending to a terrific book. I enjoyed it a lot. I was expecting some dumb action with hyperviolence, sort of a Penetrator sports novel, but I got a lot more than that. I’m glad I did.